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Discovery of insulin. If the symptoms of diabetes have been known since Antiquity, it is at the end of the 19th century that several investigators searched for the active substance of the pancreas and endeavoured to produce extracts that lowered blood and urine glucose and decreased polyuria in pancreatectomized dogs. The breakthrough came 100 years ago when the team of Frederick Banting, Charles Best and James Collip, working in the Department of Physiology, headed by John MacLeod at the University of Toronto, managed to obtain pancreatic extracts that could be used to treat patients and rescue them from the edge of death by starvation, the only treatment then available. This achievement was quickly recognized by the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine to Banting and MacLeod in 1923. The discovery has had important scientific, industrial and clinical developments still efficient nowadays., (© Société de Biologie, 2022.)

The isolation of insulin from the pancreas and its purification to a degree permitting its safe administration to type 1 diabetic patients were accomplished 100 years ago at the University of Toronto by Banting, Best, Collip and McLeod and constitute undeniably one of the major medical therapeutic revolutions, recognized by the attribution of the 1923 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine to Banting and McLeod. The clinical spin off was immediate as well as the internationalization of insulin's commercial production. The outcomes regarding basic research were much slower, in particular regarding the molecular mechanisms of insulin action on its target cells. It took almost a half-century before the determination of the tri-dimensional structure of insulin in 1969 and the characterization of its cell receptor in 1970-1971. The demonstration that the insulin receptor is in fact an enzyme named tyrosine kinase came in the years 1982-1985, and the crystal structure of the intracellular kinase domain 10 years later. The crystal structure of the first intracellular kinase substrate (IRS-1) in 1991 paved the way for the elucidation of the intracellular signalling pathways but it took 15 more years to obtain the complete crystal structure of the extracellular receptor domain (without insulin) in 2006. Since then, the determination of the structure of the whole insulin-receptor complex in both the inactive and activated states has made considerable progress, not least due to recent improvement in the resolution power of cryo-electron microscopy. I will here review the steps in the development of the concept of hormone receptor, and of our knowledge of the structure and molecular mechanism of activation of the insulin receptor., (© Société de Biologie, 2022.)

The Canadian Frederick Banting (1891-1941), in discovering the existence of insulin, was able to treat, for the first time, with efficiency, diabetic patients. This discovery and its application did not happen easily, in particular within his own team. In 1922, the Nobel Prize would reward this researcher, who died two decades later in an airplane crash., (Copyright 2010 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.)

When a medical problem is studied intensively by several investigators in the world, a solution may sometimes be found simultaneously in different countries. Seventy-five years after the discovery of insulin, the chronology of this event can be reconsidered objectively and the role of each of the protagonists evaluated. The stubbornness of Banting and Best, the technical abilities of Collip and the active support of Macleod were determinant in the use of insulin for the treatment of diabetic patients. Moreover, in the long line of experimentalists and physicians, Lancereaux and Paulesco also deserve special mention.

When a medical problem is intensively studied by many teams in the world, it is frequent to see the solution found simultaneously in different countries. However that was not exactly the case concerning the extraction of a potent insulin able to cure Diabetes Mellitus. It seems necessary, seventy five years later, when passions are quenched, to reconsider the chronology of the history and put Paolesco but also Collip at the right places much before Banting and Best to whom, by a curious misinterpretation of facts, was attributed the priority of this fundamental discovery.