The Insulin Patent Sold for One Dollar - December 27, 1923

Before 1922, a diabetes diagnosis was a death sentence, especially for children who wasted away on starvation diets while their families watched helplessly. On December 27, 1923, Frederick Banting, Charles Best, and James Collip sold their patent for the life-saving hormone insulin to the University of Toronto for one dollar. "Insulin does not belong to me," Banting explained, "it belongs to the world." In this episode, we explore the dramatic story of insulin's discovery in a sweltering Toronto lab in 1921, the first patient, Leonard Thompson, who came back from death's door, the researchers' deliberate choice to forgo wealth, and the devastating irony that insulin now costs hundreds of dollars per vial in the United States. As Americans ration insulin and die from a treatable condition, we examine what happened to the promise that insulin "belongs to the world" and what Banting's ethical choice teaches us about pharmaceutical patents, drug pricing, and the values we want guiding healthcare today. Through George Santayana's wisdom about remembering the past, we discover that forgetting values is as dangerous as forgetting events a powerful Canadian medical achievement with urgent modern relevance.