Murder by stupidity
The first attempt to isolate a pancreatic extract by means of which the levels of blood glucose could be normalised in dogs was described by a Romanian researcher called Nicolae Paulescu1, but his experiments were interrupted by the First World War and were never acknowledged appropriately. However, after the war, in 1921, a young surgeon named Frederick Banting and his assistant Charles Best, from the University of Toronto, worked out how to remove insulin from a dog’s pancreas.