Macromolecular complex





Nicolae Paulescu, a Romanian professor of physiology at the University of Medicine and Pharmacy in Bucharest, was the first to isolate insulin. He did that in 1916. He called it pancrein. He isolated it by developing an aqueous pancreatic extract which, when injected into a diabetic dog, proved to have a normalizing effect on blood sugar levels. He had to interrupt his experiments because of World War I. In early 1921 he wrote four papers about his work carried out in Bucharest and his tests on a diabetic dog. Later that year, he detailed his work by publishing an extensive whitepaper on the effect of the pancreatic extract injected into a diabetic animal, which he called: "Research on the Role of the Pancreas in Food Assimilation", with the paper received the 22 June 1921 by the "Archives Internationales de Physiologie"[1][2] , with the photocopy of the article available in the Gerstein Science Information Centre.

Dr. Frederick Banting, a general practician, who was also teaching orthopaedics and anthropology part-time at the University of Western Ontario in London at the time of Paulescu's published research regarding the already developed aqueous pancreatic extract and Charles Best, a a 22-year-old medical student at the University of Toronto who worked at the time as an assistant to the surgeon Dr. Frederick Banting also did similar experiments while trying to find a cure for diabetes. In these experiments they used as well dogs.

They first knew insulin would control diabetes in a person when they injected some insulin into a 14-year-old boy named Leonard Thompson[3] who was dying of diabetes. After the injection he survived. Banting won the 1923 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, along with John Macleod, for the discovery of insulin. Best and Paulescu were not honored at that time.



  1. Paulesco, N.C. (1921, August 31), "Recherche sur le rôle du pancréas dans l'assimilation nutritive.", Archives Internationales de Physiologie, 17: 85–103 Check date values in: |year= (help)
  2. Lestradet, H. (1997), "Le 75e anniversaire de la découverte de l'insuline.", Diabetes & Metabolism, 23 (1): 112