James B. Collip—Member of the Canadian Team That Isolated Insulin

Abstract

From the Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN (M.A.S., R.A.K.); and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, MA (D.P.S.). A mong the many controversial inclusions and exclusions in the history of Nobel laureate selections, the most widely known erroneous omission of a deserving candidate occurred when the 1923 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for the discovery of insulindthe hormone that regulates glucosedwas awarded to Frederick G. Banting (1891-1941) and John James R. Macleod (1876-1935) at the University of Toronto. Banting was particularly angry about this choice, arguing that Macleod was only a department chair and was not involved with the work, and that instead medical student Charles H. Best (1899-1978) deserved a share of the award. Banting shared part of his prize money with Best. Macleod in turn gave part of his Nobel award to biochemist James Bertram Collip, who he recruited to Toronto and who had isolated and purified insulin from pancreatic extract. (In 1916, Romanian physiologist Nicolae Paulescu [1869-1931] had prepared a less pure bovine pancreatic extract called pancreine, which contained enough insulin to normalize glucose levels in hyperglycemic dogs.) Collip was born on November 20, 1892, in rural Belleville in southeastern Ontario, about 50 miles west of Kingston. He received his early education in a one-room country school and entered Trinity College, University of Toronto, in 1908. After graduating in 1912 with a major in physiology and biochemistry, followed by completion of a PhD degree in biochemistry in 1916, he joined the faculty of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Alberta. In 1921, he was awarded a Rockefeller Traveling Fellowship, which allowed him to work with Banting and Best in Macleod’s department in Toronto. While at the University of Toronto, Collip developed a method for the quantitative measurement of insulin in pancreatic extract and succeeded in isolating and purifying insulin (1921), thus making it available for therapeutic