The Book of PeptidesThe Book of Peptidesthe first modern peptide drug
October 1920 (Banting's idea note); 1921-22 (Toronto discovery and first patients); December 1922 ($1 patent assignment); 1923 (US patent granted, Nobel Prize)
Everyone knows insulin's discoverers sold the patent for a dollar. Almost no one can point to where Banting said it "belongs to the world" — and the dollar never made insulin cheap.
In the small hours of October 31, 1920, a struggling small-town surgeon in London, Ontario named Frederick Banting — fresh from preparing a lecture on the pancreas he was barely qualified to give — scrawled a note that would reroute medical history: "Diabetus. Ligate pancreatic ducts of dog… try to insolate the internal secretion of these to relieve glycosuria." Two words misspelled, one Nobel Prize inbound. The University of Toronto's J.J.R. Macleod, a world authority on carbohydrate metabolism, was openly skeptical but gave Banting lab space, dogs, and a fourth-year student assistant named Charles Best starting May 1921. Through a sweltering summer of grim canine surgeries, the pair coaxed out a pancreatic extract they called "Isletin" — and by August 4, 1921, it was measurably lowering a depancreatized dog's blood sugar.
The crude extract was still too filthy for humans, so Macleod added the biochemist James Collip to the team on December 12, 1921. On January 11, 1922, 14-year-old Leonard Thompson, dying of diabetes at Toronto General Hospital, received Banting and Best's extract: a modest blood-sugar dip and a sterile abscess — a near-failure. Twelve days later, on January 23, Collip's purified version produced one of medicine's most dramatic before-and-afters: blood glucose fell from 520 to 120 mg/dl and ketonuria vanished. The team promptly nearly destroyed itself — Collip threatened to withhold his purification method and Banting, by later accounts, physically went for him. When the 1923 Nobel Prize went to Banting and Macleod alone, a furious Banting split his half of the money with Best; Macleod split his with Collip.
Then came the decision the world remembers. The medical ethics of the era held that physicians did not patent cures, and Banting wanted no part of one — in the standard historical account, the patent application first went forward in the names of Best and Collip, the two non-physicians, with Banting persuaded to add his name only when advised the patent would be legally stronger for it. By the time anything was filed, the three inventors had already assigned their rights to the Governors of the University of Toronto for a token one dollar apiece, finalized in December 1922 — US Patent 1,469,994, filed January 12, 1923 and granted that October, issued with that assignment already printed in its header. The stated logic was defensive, not commercial: with the method published and the patent held by a university, "no one could secure a profitable monopoly."
The dollar is real — peer-reviewed histories record the token assignment, splitting between "$1 each" and "$1 total". The gloss is not: in the standard account Banting at first refused to be named on the patent; the dollar was contract-law formality, not a price; the "belongs to the world" line has no located contemporaneous primary source — its one peer-reviewed citation dead-ends at a hall-of-fame webpage; and it never meant cheap insulin — Toronto collected royalties and Eli Lilly grossed over $1 million in year one.
Insulin is the ancestor of every compound in this book: the first peptide drug in the modern sense — a defined, purified molecule rather than a crude glandular extract — and, via the first recombinant human insulins of the early 1980s, the template for industrial-scale peptide manufacture. It is also the standing case study in how little founding altruism binds a market: in September 2020 the WHO's Director-General called it "a failure of society" that people who need insulin face financial hardship or go without, and three manufacturers still dominate global supply. It leads a quieter second life in bodybuilding as an off-label anabolic — the one compound in this book's orbit where a dosing error puts a non-diabetic user in a hypoglycemic coma within hours: published emergency-medicine case reports document exactly that presentation (Heidet et al., J Emerg Med 2019; Konrad et al., 1998).
What the dollar actually bought is the part the legend skips. It was never a price — a nominal dollar is simply what makes an assignment contract legally binding — and it never made insulin free. The university's Insulin Committee became a licensing operation: Connaught Laboratories made insulin for Canada, Eli Lilly signed a carefully-worded one-year exclusive US development contract on May 30, 1922 and grossed over $1 million on "Iletin" in its first year of sales, and Toronto collected roughly CAD 8 million in North American licensing royalties between 1923 and 1967 — plowed back into research, but royalties all the same. A century of improvement patents (protamine-zinc, lente, recombinant, modern analogs) then kept working insulins under patent protection long after 1,469,994 expired.