The 1923 Nobel Prize for the discovery of insulin in a 100‐year perspective
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Dear Editor, On December 10, 1923 the Nobel Prize was awarded according to the by-then tradition in the celebration hall of the Royal Musical Academy at Nybrokajen 11 in Stockholm, Sweden. But everything was not as usual at this time. The awardees of the prize in physiology or medicine Frederick G Banting and John J R Macleod from Toronto, Canada were unable to attend the ceremony, and their prize was received by the Ambassador of the British Commonwealth in Stockholm for further promotion. Behind the laureates' nonappearance was widespread internal and external dissatisfaction, not with awarding the discovery of insulin, but with the choice of laureates. Should both or only one of them, possibly in combination with a coworker, have received the award instead? The choice of John Macleod was questioned, and when Banting received the telegram from the Nobel Committee that he had been awarded, he was so angry that Macleod was offered the same honor that he initially refused to accept the prize. He was, however, persuaded to accept but decided that he would share the prize money with his associate, Charles Best. Macleod decided likewise but shared his part with the biochemist James Collip. This documentary [link: https://youtu.be/9_4LR-J_4g0?si=HprHDLbXu1pi4Ff2] is based on an article by the authors [1]. The second and third parts are, however, expanded with new material. In it, we give our view of the problems that were associated with this Nobel Prize in today's perspective. The first section summarizes the development of knowledge on diabetes until the beginning of the 1920s, whereas the evaluation of Nobel activities at the Karolinska Institutet is scrutinized in the middle section. Finally, some later advances, based on the discovery of insulin and of great importance for the treatment of diabetes, will be reviewed. Writing – original draft; writing – review and editing: Magnus Lindsten. The authors declare that there are no conflicts ofinterest.
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 | 0.001 |
| 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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".