Author’s Night | The Discovery of Insulin: A Miracle Drug, A Nobel Prize Controversy, and the Story of Elizabeth Hughes

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The discovery and development of insulin saw Frederick Banting, a young doctor with no research experience, persuade a veteran Toronto researcher and doctor JJR MacLeod, to explore his unique idea regarding diabetes as a summer project in a University of Toronto laboratory. The lecture discusses the details of Banting and Best’s subsequent strife-filled collaboration and the important role of a small American drug manufacturer named Eli Lilly, juxtaposed with the story of Elizabeth Hughes.

Elizabeth Hughes was diagnosed with diabetes in 1919 at the age of twelve. At that time, the best therapy for diabetes was Frederick Allen’s starvation treatment, in which patients were put on a strict dietary regime-keeping them on a knife’s edge between sugar poisoning and outright starvation. Allen’s severe dietary restrictions were no cure for diabetes, but merely a stopgap measure, with the hope that it would enable patients to survive long enough for a diabetes cure to be found. Elizabeth Hughes was one of Allen’s most famous patients, and one of the first for whom the starvation gamble paid off when insulin treatments began to be tested on human patients in 1922.