For example, in 1921 a young medical practitioner called Frederick Banting went to the Department of Physiology in the University of Toronto with a new idea about diabetes mellitus which lead to the discovery of insulin in 1922. At that time, it was well known that the pancreas was vital for the maintenance of a normal blood sugar level and removing the pancreas resulted in experimentally induced diabetes mellitus. However, despite many years of research in the best centers in the world, it had not been possible to extract the active hormone from pancreatic tissue. Banting was of the opinion that digestive enzymes became activated in the pancreas, destroying the hormone during the extraction process. Previous studies had shown that pancreatic duct ligation resulted in pancreatic atrophy but diabetes mellitus did not develop. This knowledge allowed Banting to make a pancreatic preparation from which insulin could be isolated. Clearly, a surgical approach would not permit insulin production on a large scale but Banting’s experiments led to the development of laboratory techniques for isolating insulin from the pancreas of pigs and cows. The rest, as they say, is history. Students will be interested to learn that Frederick Banting, who graduated from the University of Toronto, had little or no research experience and his co-worker was still a medical student at the time they discovered insulin. The medical student, Charles Herbert Best, subsequently went on to become Professor of Physiology and Head of the Banting Best Medical Research Institute at Toronto University.