100 Years of Insulin, but Millions Still Without Access

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

It's the 100th anniversary of the discovery of insulin. I'm going to talk about what I think is interesting in its history and then touch on the issues that we currently have with regard to people using insulin.

Insulin is Discovered

The pancreatic islet cells (the islets of Langerhans) were discovered by a medical student named Langerhans in 1869. In 1889, a pancreatectomy in a dog produced diabetes. Subsequently, multiple investigators tried to produce extracts that lowered blood glucose and helped treat diabetes in pancreatectomized dogs. But the extracts that they created were too toxic to be administered to patients.

In 1921, the team of Frederick Banting, Charles Best, and James Collip were working in the department of physiology lab, headed by Dr John Macleod, at the University of Toronto. They were able to make pancreatic extracts, first from dogs and then from cattle, which they found could be used to safely treat humans with type 1 diabetes who had previously been dying of their disease.

From the beginning, these investigators were really altruistic. In 1921, Frederick Banting said, "Insulin does not belong to me. It belongs to the world."

The first human to get the insulin extract was Leonard Thompson in January 1922.