Frederick banting (1891-1941) The Nobel Prize Winner

Frederick Banting, a Canadian scientist, was born in Alliston, Ontario, Canada, in a poor family. His father always wanted him to become a minister, but Fred decided to study medicine. After graduation in 1916 he was at once appointed a lieutenant in the Canadian Army Medical Corps as the World War I lasted at the time.

When the war was over Banting moved to London, a city in Western Ontario. He became an instructor at the university department of physiology. One night in October 1920 he was preparing for the lectures. He was to lecture on the pancreas and deeply interested in the treatment of diabetes.

By that time doctors had known that the pancreas had some influence on the way in which sugar was used in the human body. But Banting was the first to show that the Islets of Langerhans (a cluster of cells in the pancreas) had something valuable that influenced the diabetes treatment.

Banting decided to go to Toronto to make a series of experiments with dogs. Nobody at the University of Toronto showed interest in his experiments but he was given a small laboratory and ten dogs. One of his students, Charles Best, became his assistant. The experiments of Banting and Best were successful. They obtained the pure secretion of the Islets of Langerhans and injected it into the vein of the dog which had been artificially given diabetes by removing its pancreas. Within a few hours the blood sugar level of the sick dog returned to normal. Banting called this mysterious secretion “isletin”. Later the substance was given the name “insulin”.

In January 1922 insulin was injected to the first human patient – a 14-year-old boy in the critical stage of diabetes. He was given insulin in gradually increasing doses. The blood sugar level dropped! It was a turning point in medical history. Until that moment diabetes meant an early death.

In 1923 Banting’s work was awarded the Nobel Prize.

Hugo theorell (1903-1982) The Nobel Prize Winner

Axel Hugo Theodor Theorell was born at Linköping, Sweden, on July 6, 1903. He was the son of a surgeon. Theorell was educated for nine years at a State Secondary School in Linköping. In September, 1921, he began to study medicine at the Karolinska Institute and in 1924 he graduated as a Bachelor of Medicine. He then spent three months studying bacteriology at the Pasteur Institute in Paris.

In 1930 he obtained his M.D. degree with a thesis on the lipids of the blood plasma, and was appointed lecturer in physiological chemistry at the Karolinska Institute. Since 1924, Theorell had been on the Staff of the Medico-Chemical Institution, first as an associate assistant and during the years 1928-1929 as a temporary Associate Professor. Here he carried out his first work on the influence of the lipids on the sedimentation of the blood corpuscles. In 1931 he studied the molecular weight of myoglobin with the aid of the ultracentrifuge.

In 1932 he was appointed Associate Professor in Medical and Physiological Chemistry at Uppsala University, and here he continued and extended his work on myoglobin. From 1933 until 1935 Theorell held a Rockefeller Fellowship and became interested in oxidation enzymes, a subject to which he has given his attention ever since. At Berlin-Dahlem he produced, for the first time, the oxidation enzyme called “the yellow ferment”.

Returning to Sweden in 1935, Theorell worked at the Karolinska Institute and in 1936 he was appointed Head of the newly established Biochemical Department of the Nobel Medical Institute, which was opened in 1937. For ten years this Institute was housed in the Karolinska Institute, but in 1947 it was able to occupy its own building. Since 1935, Theorell carried out researches on various oxidation enzymes. For his work on the nature and effects of oxidation enzymes he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine for 1955.

Theorell was a member of learned societies in Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, the U.S.A., France, Italy, Poland, Belgium and India. He was Chairman of the Swedish Medical Society in 1947-1948 and 1957-1958, and served as Secretary of that Society during 1940-1946.

He was also Chairman of the Association of Swedish Chemists from 1947-1949. Since 1954 he has been Chief Editor of the journal Nordisk Medicin. He was a member of many Government Committees and Chairman of the Swedish National Committee for Biochemistry.

His interest in music is shown by the facts that he is also a Member of the Swedish Royal Academy of Music and Chairman of the Stockholm Symphony Society.

Theorell held honorary doctorates of the Universities of Paris, Pennsylvania, Brussels and Rio de Janeiro, and was a Foreign Member of the Royal Society of London, and the National Academy of Sciences of Washington.

In 1931 he married. They had one daughter, who died in 1935, and three sons.

Hugo Theorell died in 1982.