Frederick Grant Banting was a Canadian physician who discovered insulin with the collaboration of Charles H. Best, John James Rickard Macleod, and James Bertram Collip. Insulin is a hormone that is secreted by the pancreas, and that regulates the level of glucose (sugar) in the blood. The discovery of insulin led to a treatment for diabetes, a disease that at the time of Banting's youth, usually meant death within a few years for those who developed it. For his contribution to this work, Banting shared the 1923 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine with Macleod, the physiologist in whose laboratory the insulin research was carried out. It was the first Nobel Prize to be awarded to a Canadian.

Banting was born near Alliston, Ontario, about 40 miles north of Toronto. He was the youngest of five children of William Thompson Banting, a farmer whose parents had emigrated to Canada from...