Frederick Banting's principal achievement was the first isolation of the hormone insulin in 1921 and its successful use in treating diabetes. For this, Banting received the 1923 Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine along with John J. R. Macleod (1876-1935).

Frederick Banting was born in Alliston, Ontario. An average student, he graduated in 1916 from the University of Toronto medical school. After Medical Corps service in World War I, he completed his internship at Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children before beginning a medical practice in London, Ontario. Through an article on diabetes in a medical journal, Banting became interested in the disease, which he began to study at the University of Western Ontario.

By the early 1900s, scientists knew that the pancreas, an organ connected to the small intestine, was involved in diabetes. A pancreas hormone that reduced the blood glucose level was proposed in 1916 by the English physiologist Edward Sharpey-Sch...