Written by guest blogger Alison Li.
Pop Quiz. Fill in the blank.
Banting and _________ were awarded the 1923 Nobel Prize for the discovery of insulin.
If you are like many Canadians, you might have filled in “Best” as your answer. Unfortunately, you would have been wrong. You can, however, take comfort in the fact that you are in very good company. At an event I recently attended, even eminent historians expressed surprise that the actual answer was “Macleod.”
October 25, 2023, marks the 100th anniversary of the award of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine to Frederick Banting and John James Rickard Macleod. Banting took the unusual step of immediately announcing that he was sharing his award with Charles Best, who had been his student assistant. Macleod followed suit by announcing that he shared his award with biochemist James Bertram Collip to indicate that Collip’s role had been equal to that of the others. This was the first Nobel Prize awarded to Canadians and it recognized a medical achievement that has gone on to save the lives of hundreds of millions of people with diabetes.
In the century since, Macleod’s crucial contribution to the discovery has been obscured. The reasons for this are complicated. In the September issue of the Canadian Journal of Health History 40, 2, Christopher Rutty, James Wright, and I have brought together four articles by Rutty, Wright, Kenneth McHardy, and Edwin Gale to reconsider Macleod’s role in the insulin research. These scholars describe Macleod as a highly respected professor of physiology at the University of Toronto and an expert in carbohydrate metabolism who not only provided scientific guidance, personnel, and resources, but acted, as Rutty tells us, as the managing director of the entire enterprise.
Thanks to the generosity of AMS Healthcare, these articles are now available via Open Access. We invite you to explore with us the life and work of one of Canada’s first Nobel Laureates, a scientist of integrity and talent whose work deserves greater recognition.
ALISON LI is an historian of science and medicine. She writes about hormones and the culture in which they are shaped. Her latest work is Wondrous Transformations (University of North Carolina Press, 2023), the biography of Harry Benjamin, the physician who played a pivotal role in the development of transgender medicine.
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www.torontomedicalhistoricalclub.ca
www.alisonli.com
The Canadian Journal of Health History 40.2 Special Issue on J.J.R. Macleod, Reconsidered: Insulin and Beyond was guest edited by Alison Li, Christopher J. Rutty, and James R. Wright.
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