Spark-Plug Man

Just before dark, one evening last week in Toronto, a big, camouflaged bomber swooped in from the east. From it was taken the mortal remains of Major Sir Frederick Grant Banting, world-famed co-discoverer of insulin, dead at 49 after a bomber in which he was flying to England crashed in Newfoundland (TIME, March 3).

Next day the body of the man who made life livable for diabetics lay in state in the University of Toronto's Convocation Hall, where almost 25 years ago he kneeled to receive his medical degree from the university chancellor. Dozens of his colleagues, thousands of Toronto citizens filed past. An unending stream of messenger boys delivered tributes from all over the continent. In the afternoon Dr. Banting was buried in Mount Pleasant Cemetery.

Newshawks (whom he hated) and col leagues last week recalled some episodes of Sir Frederick's turbulent career. He was a stubborn man of strong feelings, sudden temper, trenchant speech. After insulin was discovered in 1921, Biochemist James Bertram Collip was called in to polish up the glandular extraction technique. The stuff began to be called "Collip's extract." Banting leaped on Collip in the university halls, threw him down, banged his head on the floor, bellowed: "So, you will call this 'Collip's extract,' will you!"

In 1923 the Nobel Prize for Medicine was 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.

Macleod retaliated by giving Collip half of his share. Macleod is dead now, and time softened the animosity between Collip and Banting. Said Dr. Collip last week: ''I have lost a close personal friend." Few years ago Banting was invited by a U. S. university to deliver a two-hour discourse on diabetes. "Hell," he observed, "for all I know about diabetes 15 minutes would be enough." He had known even less than that about it the October night in 1920 when he sat down to brush up for a lecture to students next day. He knew, of course, that a gland called the pancreas is involved. He read that a German named Langerhans had found in the pancreas little patches of specialized cells, called the islands of Langerhans, and that autopsies on diabetics showed that these islands were degenerate.

Since diabetics are unable to burn up the sugar they consume, it looked as though the islands in a normal pancreas secreted some substance which acted like a spark plug. What was the spark plug? That same night, Banting read in a medical journal that if you tie off a pancreas duct, the digestive juice cells shrivel up, die. That gave him the great idea--how to get the digestive juices out of the way, to get at the spark-plug chemical. He wrote three sentences in a notebook: "Tie off pancreatic duct of dogs. Wait six to eight weeks for degeneration. Remove residue and extract." Then he went to bed, but probably not to sleep.

Banting went to Macleod, asked for ten dogs and an assistant for eight weeks. He got them. He and Charles Herbert Best, still a medical student but an expert on blood sugar measurement, went feverishly to work in a hot, shabby little laboratory heavy with the smell of anesthetic. Many more dogs than ten were necessary; in fact, one of the key dogs of the search was No. 92. But one day a miracle happened. A dog which the experimenters had turned into a diabetic by removing its 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 was one of the first of millions restored by insulin to a nearly normal life.

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.

In World War I, Banting, who served with the Canadian forces, was wounded in the arm. Surgeons told him that if it was not amputated he would die. Stubborn Fred Banting said, "I'm going to keep that arm," and he did. When World War II broke, he was too old to fight but he wanted to help. Turning up in Ottawa in dowdy clothes spotted by cigaret ashes, he promoted a laboratory for aviation research. Rumor had it that he was working on ways to prevent "blackouts" (brief losses of consciousness) in fighter pilots pulling out of steep dives. It was in connection with this work that he was flying to England.

It was known last week that Dr. Banting was not immediately killed in the crash, but was able to bandage the injuries of Captain Joseph Mackey, the only survivor. When he had done that, he lay down on a bed of broken branches, covered himself with his overcoat, and stopped being stubborn.

The war has cut down dope smuggling so sharply, according to a report from Washington, that prices have soared in the bootleg drug trade. Many addicts are seeking cures; others have taken to paregoric (camphorated tincture of opium).

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