Frederick Banting was born on November 14, 1891, on a farm outside Alliston, Ontario, the youngest of five children. He studied medicine at the University of Toronto, served as a field surgeon in the First World War — he was wounded at Cambrai and awarded the Military Cross — and came home to a struggling small practice in London, Ontario.

A sleepless night in October 1920 gave him an idea for isolating the internal secretion of the pancreas. Back in Toronto, working in J.J.R. Macleod's laboratory with student Charles Best, Banting produced the extract that became insulin; biochemist James Collip purified it, and in January 1922 a dying fourteen-year-old, Leonard Thompson, became the first patient saved by it. Banting and Macleod received the 1923 Nobel Prize — Banting, at 32, remains the youngest-ever laureate in medicine — and he split his prize money with Best. The discoverers assigned the insulin patent to the University of Toronto for a dollar, so it would belong to the world. Knighted in 1934, Banting died on February 21, 1941, when his aircraft crashed in Newfoundland while he was on a wartime mission.