Dr. Banting’s Miracle Drug

What does it mean to be a scientific hero? That provocative question is at the heart of the strange-but-true story of the discovery of insulin in the early 1920s. Before insulin, type 1 diabetes condemned children to a horrible and certain death. But in one of the first miracles of modern medicine, insulin turned diabetes into a manageable chronic condition. History has given Canadian physician FrederickBanting the lion’s share of the credit in the discovery, but the real story is far more nuanced and dramatic. The mythic hero scientist might work for newspaper headlines and Hollywood films, but insulin shows us that the paths to revolutionary scientific discoveries are almost always far more complicated and ultimately more interesting.