This Man Saved Millions Of Lives

Northern Advocate, 26 May 1941, Page 2

This Man Saved Millions Of Lives

In every year before the last war (writes Guy Ramsay in the “News Chronicle”) one person in every ten thousand in the British Isles died a loathsome death, a lingering death: with muscles that wenl increasingly flabby, with powers that progressively failed. They were harrowed by hunger that it was fatal to satisfy; they were tormented by thirst that no drink could assuage. Ultimately, starving themselves to keep alive for a month or a week or a day longer, they fell into a diseased sleep from which barely one awoke.

4000 Deaths A Year

Four thousand a year died in Britain; a proportionate number elsewhere in the world; 200,000 a year. Those were the fatalities; but people could —and did—live with this horrible disease for years. „ The disease is diabetes, sometimes called sugar-sickness. Sugar makes energy—when it is adequately burned up in the body. Diabetics could not burn up their sugar. They voided it in almost every excretion of'the body from tears to urine; but still it choked their veins.

The only treatment—it was not even a cure—known was to cut down food to a minimum and just accept the overwhelming depression that the disease, aggravated by starvation, involved. What made the sickness even more of a scourge was the fact that the younger the patient the less chance he had of recovery.

Banting Begins Frederick Banting was a yonug Canadian with an inquisitive nose and an obstinate chin. He had refused to allow the surgeons to amputate a wounded arm during the last war; and he came back from France to put up his plate as a surgeon. After a month of waiting, his books showed 16/ gross profit. So he took a job as a demonstrator at a medical school. His lecture next day was to be on the pancreas; that organ commonly called the sweetbread, which injects into the intestine a juice that bufns up sugar and transmutes it into energy, splits up the fats and butter we eat, and renders proteins nourishing. Without a pancreas, one died of diabetes; that had been proved vivisectionally. But you could prevent the digestive juice flowing into the intestine by tying the duct and the patient did not contract sugar sickness. Preparing for his lecture Banting waded through several text books and a current magazine. He suddenly began to synthesise his reading. He strove, in his own words, to “bridge a wide spark-gap between two remote ideas.”

The synthesis was this: that the pancreas itself was the anti-diabetic principle—not the juice from it. And from the synthesis was born a new idea: could one not use a pancreas whose digestive function was finished to cure diabetes ?

Banting went to see Professor MacLeod in the University of Toronto. He put up his idea. At first, MacLeod was sceptical: what proof. What qualifications as a research-worker had Banting. But the man who would not allow the medical officers to amputate his arm would not permit Professor MacLeod to refuse him a hearing and a chance. Finally, the great scientist asked the stubborn man: “What do you want?” The answer came swift and direct: “Ten dogs and an assistant for eight weeks.”

He got them.

First Experiments

He began his experimenting on May 16. 1921. His assistant was Charles H. Best, still a student, already an expert in determining the sugar-content of excretions or blood.

The first experiment, seven weeks long, was a failure. Banting had tied off the pancreas ducts too tightly. With one week to go, he began again; tying off a pancreas duct, allowing the dog to recover; then removing the remainder of the pancreas—the so-called Langerhans islands—and making a solution of them as a possible cure for diabetes.

In the sweltering heat of that phenomenally hot summer; in a windowless room, whose skylight let In the heat, but kept out the light, Banting and Best went on working. MacLeod had gone to Europe—but had not terminated his grant to Banting—but there was no money grant. They lived on savings, credit, work —and hope. Dog As Victim

A dog given diabetes artificially by the removal of its pancreas was panting away its life. From another dog Banting removed the pancreas whose duct he had tied off; pounded it in salt water, and injected it into the diabetic specimen. Within one hour the dog’s blood was as sugar-free as that of a normal dog. The sugar-water which the dog had been so unable to assimilate the previous day that it had run clear through ft was now acceptable. The dog that had panted out its life was now on its legs. Triumph—and disaster. Next day—the dog was dead. Of diabetes. A fluke ? Perhaps. Not enough pancreas ? Maybe. But you could not go on killing one dog a day to get enough pancreas to keep another dog alive.

Banting tried using liver, using spleen. In vain. A second dog was kept alive for three days by using the pancreas of two other animals. Dog 92

For the pet of the laboratory—Dog 92—five dogs died to keep her alive for eight days; but Banting and Best had learned that acid, not alkali, was the better extracting medium for the pancreas.

Banting tried another technique to save tying off the duct; by homoeopathic injection—a quicker method. That worked, and Dog 92 lived for 20 days. From sweltering July until icy November Banting and Best, without money, without help, slogged aw T ay. By January, 1922, a collie had lived 70 days without a pancreas; just seven times as long as any diabetic dog had ever lived before.

From vivisection to experiment on humanity. Banting’s first test was on himself; his second on Best. But neither yas a diabetic. A physician, named Gilchrist, a diabetic, contracted influenza—often fatal to diabetics. He knew Banting: he chanced the new treatment. The first dose revived him. Gilchrist became 'a human rabbit for experiment: an experiment which succeeded.

Banting Is Immortal

Today, wherever civilisation and medical science are available, men and women—and children—with diabetes live normal lives; eat normal food; do normal work with an injection or two daily of this pancreatic secretion which Frederick Banting discovered and which has been perfected by a dozen devoted scientists. Just how de*

voted may be guessed by the fact that Professor Allen, who worked on the Starvation, pre-insulin cure, was one of the first to congratulate the discoverers, of the method that made his own life-work a mockery. - »

Banting has been killed in a plane crash. , But wherever one diabetic is alive that would, without insulin, have been dead; wherever one diabetic is active, where he would, without insulin, have been passive—there Frederick Brantmg, Nobel Prize winner, K.8.E., in 1934, REIS, in 1935, is still alive. Banting is - immortal—for he lives through millions still alive and millions yet to be born.

Mr I. J. Goldstine, president of the Auckland Milk Council, and Mr T. R. Overton, engineer of the North Auckland Electric-Power Board, are guests at the Commercial Hotel.