Before insulin, a diagnosis of type 1 diabetes was a death sentence, managed only by starvation diets that bought a few months. Thompson weighed about 65 pounds when he received an extract prepared by Frederick Banting and Charles Best's team at the University of Toronto. The first dose was too impure and caused an abscess, but a refined extract by the biochemist James Collip, given about two weeks later, brought his blood sugar down. Within a year insulin was being manufactured commercially.
Leonard Thompson had been admitted to Toronto General Hospital as a charity patient, drifting in and out of a diabetic coma. His doctors had little to offer beyond the "starvation diet", which kept patients alive by keeping them on the edge of hunger. Banting and Best had spent the previous summer isolating a pancreatic extract that lowered blood sugar in diabetic dogs. Thompson would be the first human test.
The first injection, on January 11, 1922, was a disappointment. The murky extract lowered his blood sugar only slightly and caused a painful abscess, and the trial was halted. James Collip, a biochemist brought in to purify the material, worked through the following days to produce a cleaner version. When Thompson received it on January 23, his blood sugar fell to near normal and the ketones in his urine disappeared.
The news spread fast. Within months desperate families were travelling to Toronto, and in 1923 Banting and the lab's director, John Macleod, shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Banting split his prize money with Best. Thompson lived another 13 years on insulin injections, dying in 1935 at the age of 26.
Key people: Leonard Thompson, Frederick Banting, Charles Best, James Collip