Michael Bliss
University of Chicago Press, £14.50
ISBN 0 226 05898 0
For a diabetes physician, Bliss's classic book is like “The Creation.” The Discovery of Insulin is the true tale of the medical and scientific detective work and intrigue that led to what is arguably one of the greatest achievements of the 20th century. But because it was not a cure, it was also one of the century's premier disappointments.
When I first read the book in the 1980s I couldn't put it down, and the hair on my neck still rises when I look at those handwritten notes penned during that hot Toronto summer of 1921. The story reads like one of Berton Rouche's medical detective tales or a Michael Crichton science fiction novel.
Imagine the following absurd scenario for a research proposal. A young surgeon with no bench research experience has his curiosity piqued by a casual journal article. He goes to his former professor of physiology at an obscure medical school and asks for some space and supplies to attempt to isolate the internal secretion of the pancreas—a task which researchers over the world (with one exception) had failed to achieve for half a century. The professor, leaving for his summer holiday, reluctantly gives his permission plus the assistance of an untried medical student. A late addition to the “team” is a biochemist to help purify “the stuff.”
In the course of that summer this unlikely team achieve the impossible: they isolate the active secretion of the pancreas, and the rest, as they say, is history. But not so fast. When the Nobel Prize is handed out in 1923, it is only the absent professor (Macleod) and the surgeon (Frederick Banting) who are honoured. They, with some degree of rancour, announce that they will each share their portion of the prize with someone else. Banting gives a share to the medical student, Charles Best, while Macleod shares his with the biochemist, Collip.
Banting and Best, in their first paper on the experiment, incorrectly and perhaps deliberately implied that a Romanian investigator (Paulesco) had negative results with a similar experiment, thus dooming him to oblivion.
Do you like history? Do you love intrigue and mystery? How about a good read? The Discovery of Insulin, recently re-released, is a memorable read by a first rate author and historian.