Frederick Banting An article he read about the pancreas piqued Banting's interest in diabetes. Banting had to give a talk on the pancreas to one of his classes at the University of Western Ontario on November 1, 1920, and he was therefore reading reports that other scientists had written. Research by Naunyn, Minkowski, Opie, Sharpey-Schafer, and others suggested that diabetes resulted from a lack of a protein hormone secreted by the islets of Langerhans in the pancreas. Schafer had named this putative hormone "insulin". The hormone was thought to control the metabolism of sugar; its lack led to an increase of sugar
Frederick Banting medicine and, in 1919–1920, was Resident Surgeon at The Hospital for Sick Children. Banting was unable to gain a place on the hospital staff and so he decided to move to London, Ontario to set up a medical practice. From July 1920 to May 1921, he continued his general practice, while teaching orthopedics and anthropology part-time at the University of Western Ontario in London because his medical practice had not been particularly successful. From 1921 to 1922 he lectured in pharmacology at the University of Toronto. He received his M.D. degree in 1922, and was also awarded a gold medal.