A dog with no pancreas was kept alive, and a century of diabetes deaths ended

In 1921, Frederick Banting and student assistant Charles Best extracted a pancreatic hormone from dogs and used it to keep a diabetic dog alive; within months they'd purified it enough to treat a dying 14-year-old patient, whose recovery was immediate. Before insulin, a type 1 diabetes diagnosis was usually fatal within months.

— Michael Bliss, The Discovery of Insulin — University of Chicago Press, 1982
Go deeper: get the book →