Frederick Banting’s Nobel centennial: London relative ‘super proud’

This year’s Nobel Prizes have been awarded, but it was one given out a century ago that has a special place to Londoner Rebecca Redmond.

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Redmond, an artist and diabetic, is a distant cousin, removed by multiple generations, of Frederick Banting, who 100 years ago Wednesday was awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine along with colleague John Macleod for the discovery of insulin, a medical breakthrough that has saved the lives of millions of diabetics around the world.

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“I’m super-proud of everything that he did as a person. He’s a fascinating man, beyond just diabetes. He really was an interesting fellow and a great Canadian,” Redmond said.

She said she always connected with her trail-blazing relative through art – he was a passionate wilderness painter and sketch artist – and that bond only grew when she was diagnosed with diabetes.

“Well, I take it every day,” Redmond said of insulin. “I don’t make any (insulin naturally), so for 25 years I’ve been using insulin to manage my type 1 diabetes.”

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Type 1 diabetics don’t produce insulin, and require daily injections to manage the disease.

Born in Alliston, Banting was a First World War surgeon who set up shop in London afterwards. With too few patients to make ends meet, he also taught at Western University and the University of Toronto.

On a sleepless night on Oct 31, 1920, after preparing for a lecture on the pancreas that naturally produces insulin, Banting awoke in his modest brick home at Dundas and Adelaide streets, now a national historic site, and scribbled an idea.

That idea led to the discovery of insulin and changed the lives of people with diabetes, who either can’t produce insulin on their own or can’t absorb it as well as the body needs. Insulin is needed to help blood sugar get to the body’s cells for energy.

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Grateful to her distant relative for his discovery, Redmond is also an advocate for greater access to medications for diabetics and people with other ailments who can’t afford the drugs they need, saying a national pharmacare program is needed to guarantee access.

Banting teamed up with Macleod, a physiologist at the University of Toronto who made research labs available, and together they and a student named Charles Best began experimenting on how to remove insulin from a dog’s pancreas. Later, biochemist James Collip was brought in, to help purify the insulin to make it safe enough to test on humans.

A teenage boy dying from diabetes in 1922 became the first person to receive an insulin injection to counter life-threateningly high blood sugar levels.

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Banting, Best and Collip patented insulin, which they sold to the U of T for $1 each in 1923. The synthetic hormone went into commercial production later the same year.

Banting famously said, “Insulin does not belong to me, it belongs to the world” – a legacy Redmond salutes today.

“I really do believe that when they sold that patent, and he kind of released it to the world, that was their intention,” she said.

The discovery of insulin was one of the most important medical breakthroughs of the 20th century, but controversy over the exclusion of Best followed the joint awarding of the Nobel Prize to Macleod and Banting, who reportedly did not want to accept the award at first because Best was left out and who wound up sharing his prize money with him.

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Banting, who died in a plane crash in Newfoundland in 1941, remains the youngest Nobel laureate in physiology or medicine – he was 32. He was also knighted in 1934.

In London, his legacy is honored at Banting House museum and at a high school named after him.

A prolific painter, who toyed with leaving behind medicine to focus on art, Banting also spent time with some of Canada’s famous Group of Seven landscape painters and some of his works are in the collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario.

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The Local Journalism Initiative is funded by the government of Canada.

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