“It Works! Now What?” Insulin Development, Production, and Distribution at Connaught Laboratories, University of Toronto, 1922–24
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The first successful human use of a pancreatic extract on Leonard Thompson, a 13-year-old severe diabetic at Toronto General Hospital, on 23 January 1922, is generally seen as the climax of the discovery-of-insulin story. However, this seminal event in the history of medicine begs the question: “It works! Now what?” The story may well have ended abruptly if not for the foresight and leadership of Dr. John G. FitzGerald, director of the University of Toronto’s Connaught Antitoxin Laboratories, based in the basement of the same Medical Building where F.G. Banting and C.H. Best, under the direction of J.J.R. Macleod, conducted the research that led to the first tests on Thompson. Significantly, it was the addition to the team of biochemist J.B. Collip and his purification of the extract that enabled the successful 23 January test. Within a day, however, tensions within the group, especially between Banting and Collip, and Collip’s threat to leave and take out his own patent, prompted FitzGerald to act. On 25 January, FitzGerald finalized a seminal agreement between Connaught and Banting, Best, Collip, and Macleod that secured the further development of methods to prepare the extract on a larger scale to enable further clinical testing. From this point, Connaught would play a fundamental role in the insulin story, although its historical significance has been minimized and often misunderstood, overshadowed by the weight of the primary discovery, as well as by the critical contributions of Eli Lilly and Co. This article focuses on Connaught’s intimate involvement in the history of insulin from January 1922 through the summer of 1924, tracing the challenges and innovations of developing larger-scale production methods, the establishment and expansion of Canadian insulin production capacity, and the key role the labs played in spearheading the global distribution of insulin.
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 distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".