Word: insulin
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...freighter Exmouth, second U. S. relief ship (the first, the Cold Harbor, docked last fortnight at Marseille), sailed for France, carrying 12,000,000 lb. of evaporated and powdered milk, 150,000 articles of clothing for children, 500,000 units of insulin, 20,000 bottles of vitamins - as well as 12-ft. red crosses on both sides, and floodlights to illuminate them at night...
...divided between Banting and Professor John James Rickard Macleod, his department head who had made the research work possible but had done none of it until after the basic discovery. Banting was sore because he felt that Charles Best, the laboratory assistant who had actually helped him track down insulin, had been slighted. He honored Best in his own impulsive way by giving him half of his own share of the prize money...
...pancreas lay dying, unable to get to its feet. They shot some extract into him. His blood sugar fell. In a few hours the dog was walking around, wagging his tail. Banting and Best called their extract "isletin," which means island chemical. Later the name was changed to insulin, which means the same thing...
Banting found ways to get insulin from dogs without waiting for cell degeneration, then how to get ample quantities from the pancreas of cattle. The fateful question was: Would insulin save human diabetics? Joe Gilchrist, a doctor and a classmate of Banting's, was a thin, hopeless, broken diabetic living on the starvation diet that in those days postponed for a little while death from diabetic coma. He got some insulin. In a few hours his head was clear, his legs lost their heaviness, he felt as though he were walking on air. Joe Gilchrist...
Fame and the Nobel Prize did not make Banting a happy man. He had started his career as a surgeon. All his life he wanted to be a surgeon, but the discovery of insulin had plumped him into a chair of experimental medicine (i.e., research). He was not suited to it. Obstinacy rather than brilliance had enabled him to discover insulin...