The True Banting and Best Story: The Priority Rule and the Discovery of the Antidiabetic Hormone
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1993, Michael Bliss, Professor of History, University of Toronto, denounced “the Banting and Best Myth,” invented by Charles Best after F.G. Banting’s death in 1941, as an alternative version of the history of insulin discovery, with the message that “Banting and Best discovered insulin on their own in 1921.” On the occasion of the 41st Annual EASD Meeting an International Experts Symposium entitled “Who Discovered Insulin?” was organized in Delphi on September 8, 2005 to debate the priority of main contributions to the discovery of insulin. At the end of the meeting, the organizers omitted any official declaration and the announced vote of experts was cancelled. We performed a comprehensive review from 1889 to April 1923, following the premises of the priority rule defined by Merton in 1957. The main documents surveyed were original publications on the organotherapy of diabetes and patents. We identified 3 European researchers meeting the criteria of the priority rule: Eugène Émile Gley, Georg Zülzer, and Nicolae Paulescu. In several reports (1923, 1925, and 1926), J.J.R. Macleod recognized the achievements and written reports of Gley (1905), Zülzer (1908), and Paulescu (1920). Ian Murray supported (1969, 1971) the priority of Zülzer and Paulescu. Michael Bliss reported (1993) that the results published by Banting and Best in February 1922 did not overcome Zülzer’s results in 1908 and Paulescu’s results (published in 1920 and 1921). The Banting and Best Myth failed in the long run. European researchers showed priority in the discovery of the pancreatic antidiabetic hormone.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.031 | 0.083 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.012 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.022 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".