FREDERICK GRANT BANTING: BIOGRAPHY AND CONTRIBUTIONS TO SCIENCE - MEDICINE - 2024

Frederick Grant Banting was a Canadian physician, physiologist, and researcher born in the late 19th century. After obtaining his academic knowledge, he dedicated his life to researching diabetes mellitus, for which he made various contributions. Thanks to these contributions, he became a fundamental character for modern medicine.

This scientist was born on November 14, 1891 in Alliston, province of Ontario, Canada. This is a city characterized by a cold and rainy climate most of the year, and by its large areas dedicated to agriculture, mainly the cultivation of potatoes. In this context, Frederick grew up.

Biography

Banting-Grant family

His father was William Thompson Banting and his mother Mrs. Margaret Grant. Frederick was the youngest of six siblings in this Methodist family.

The personality of the child Frederick was characterized by shyness and little sociability. He had few friends his age with whom he practiced baseball and played soccer.

Marriage

Banting married Marion Robertson in 1924, from that marriage his son Guillermo was born in 1928. The couple separated in 1932 and Frederick remarried Henrietta Ball in 1937.

Banting Studies

Banting began academically as a theology student, as his aspiration was to transcend as a clergyman. While he was training in priestly subjects, he entered Victoria College in Toronto, where he studied General Arts.

Banting was unable to finish that degree due to failing a French exam. After that failure, she made the decision to study medicine. Already a medical graduate, he enlisted in the Canadian army to serve under the orders of the French army in World War I.

Participation in the First World War

In that international conflagration he was recognized with the decoration of the Military Cross. He earned it for having shown a high degree of courage and dedication in caring for and saving the lives of his comrades in arms.

Exemplary was his action of dedicating a whole day to saving the lives of his injured comrades, when he himself had been seriously injured.

After the First World War, Banting moved to London, a city in Ontario, Canada, and worked at the University of Western Ontario. There he stood out as a Physiology assistant.

He then assumed a professorship at the University of Toronto, and after serving as a professor for seven years, he assumed the position of director of the Banting Institute.

Influence of Minkowski and his test dogs

At the beginning of the 20th century, diabetes was considered incurable. Doctors of the time hardly indicated low-sugar diets to deal with the appalling pathology. This many times was counterproductive, since due to the lack of adequate food, many people contracted other diseases by neglecting the defenses in the body.

In 1889 the German physiologist Oskar Minkowski, after a long process of scientific research, came up with a momentous result. He was studying the functions of the pancreas and used dogs as experimental subjects.

Minkowski removed the pancreas from the dogs and discovered that the removal caused the diabetic symptoms. That research produced something that caught their attention: It turned out that when these pancreas-less dogs urinated, that urine attracted flies.

At that time, there was already enough information about the anatomical structure of the pancreas, divided into acinar tissue (which secretes digestive enzymes) and the islets of Langerhans, from where the pancreas secretes a substance in charge of controlling sugar levels. This substance from the islets was known as insulin.

Scientific efforts were aimed at achieving the purification of this valuable substance, but all attempts failed because the two functions were linked: the digestive function of the acinar tissue and the regulator of the sugar levels of the islets of Langerhans. Therefore, the purification processes were truncated or highly toxic.

Contributions to science

While Frederick Banting was studying medicine, the First World War broke out. That event made his career rush and in just four years he graduated to go to the service of the allied troops. However, the war received him drastically: he was wounded in the forearm and had to return to Canada.

Until that moment that experience on the battlefront was his entire resume as a physician. He did not have the investigative baggage to prove him as an investigating physician.

I was even unaware of the research references and results documenting diabetes. Banting did not possess the technical skills or methodological ability of surgeons or analytical doctors.

But one day in October 1920, preparing a class on Pancreatic Physiology to teach at Western University, he got a scientific article that caught his attention.

It recounted what happened to a laboratory dog ​​in which a pancreatic stone was obstructing the secretion ducts of digestive enzymes, and consequently they killed the acinar tissue without affecting the islets of Langerhans. That could allow the extraction of the substance that regulates sugar levels: insulin.

Start of the investigation

Frederick Banting wrote down in his notebook in the sleepless morning that followed this discovery the idea that was by then germinating in the boy's perceptive mind.

It was a mnemonic about ligating the pancreatic duct in dogs and, with live dogs, waiting for the acinar tissue to degenerate releasing the islets. Thus was born his proposal to isolate and obtain insulin.

Continuation of your investigations

With that idea, he went to Toronto to propose to John McLeod to work on his approach in the laboratories. Banting was aware of his technical limitations, but already the idea was in his mind like a glimpse.

That is why he requested help to assist him in the spaces that McLeod granted him. Thus he had two students: Charles Best and Edward Noble. On May 14, 1921, research began at the Toronto Physiological Institute.

They began the surgeries to tie the ducts of the digestive enzymes that would degenerate the acinar tissue of living dogs. They then extracted the substance and began the process of purifying the secretions from the islets of Langerhans for injection into the diabetic dogs.

Of ten injected dogs, only three survived. That beginning did not discourage them and they insisted on dealing with more dogs. With only one dog available, they made the last attempt, and on July 31, 1921 they finally achieved momentous results.

Marjorie: the surviving dog

The dog, who went by the name Majorie, showed a notable drop in her blood glucose level: from 0.12% to 0.02%. This fact constituted the greatest scientific discovery in terms of diabetes.

It was the first big step to develop research that led to the application of drugs in humans. A career was beginning that barely lasted a year and a half.

Human testing

A fourteen-year-old named Leonard Thompson, a diabetic since the age of twelve, served to test insulin after several failed tests in humans. What was missing was that after the synthesis process, the substance from the islets of Langerhans was not completely purified and contained toxic extracts.

Leonard Thompson weighed a mere 29 kilograms and was on the verge of entering a ketoacidotic coma, which would kill him.

After the first injection, which consisted of 7.5 ml in each glute, Thompson had an allergic reaction; however, he showed a slight decrease in blood glucose. The failure was due to impurities that still remained in the substance that had been extracted and treated by Drs. Frederick Banting and Charles Best.

They had to wait twelve more days to give Leonard a new injection. On this occasion, the insulin purification was carried out by Dr. James Collip, who applied 90% ethanol.

He then tested the substance on healthy rabbits. When verifying that the glycemia of the rabbits decreased and that the substance was sufficiently pure, they decided that it was time to retry in humans.

Successful treatment

On January 11, 1922, after the injection of insulin, Leonard Thompson felt physically renewed for the first time in years of diabetic disease.

By measuring their physiological values, a notable drop was found in their blood sugar levels: they had dropped from 0.52% to 0.12% in a single day, and the glucose present in the urine dropped from 71.1 to 8, 7 g.

Other contributions

In addition to this medicinal discovery, Banting devoted himself to the study of aeronautical medicine since 1930. Together with Wilbur Franks he developed the G-suit, a space suit capable of resisting gravity. Later, in World War II, that suit would be used by pilots.

The Banting and Franks design was the basis from which astronaut spacesuits were made. In addition, Banting also investigated the gases that were used in war

Death

On February 21, 1941, Frederick Banting and Wilbur Frank traveled to England to test the resistance of the G-Suit. The plane that was carrying them crashed while they were flying over Newfoundland, a province near Gander, in Newfoundland.

Both lost their lives, leaving with their investigations the way to save and improve the lives of millions of people. When Frederick Grant Banting died, he was forty-nine years old.

References

1. Baynes, John W.; Marek H. Dominiczak (2005). Medical Biochemistry (2nd Edition). Elsevier, Spain
2. Bliss, Michael (2013). The Discovery of Insulin, University of Chicago Press
3. Díaz Rojo, J. Antonio (2014). The term diabetes: historical and lexicographical aspects »
4. Jackson AY, (1943), Banting as an Artist, Ryerson Press
5. Lippincott, S Harris, (1946), Banting's miracle; the story of the discoverer of insulin