06/09/2026
On this day, 6 September 1876, a minister's son was born near Dunkeld in Perthshire, and because of him millions of people are alive who otherwise would not be. π©Ί
John James Rickard Macleod grew up in Aberdeen, took his medicine at Marischal College, and spent twenty years quietly becoming one of the best carbohydrate physiologists in the world. By 1922 he was running the physiology department at the University of Toronto, and a young surgeon named Frederick Banting had turned up at his door with an idea about the pancreas and almost no laboratory experience.
Macleod could have sent him away. Instead he gave him bench space, dogs, a summer, and a student assistant called Charles Best. When the early results looked real, he redirected his whole department onto it and brought in the biochemist James Collip to purify the extract into something you could safely put into a human being. In January 1923 a fourteen year old boy named Leonard Thompson, dying in a Toronto ward, was given the purified extract and did not die.
Before insulin, a diagnosis of what we now call type one diabetes was a death sentence measured in months. Children were kept alive a little longer on starvation diets. Parents were told to take them home.
Macleod and Banting shared the Nobel Prize in 1923. Banting, who resented Macleod bitterly, split his half with Best. Macleod, without saying much about it, split his half with Collip. Then he came home to Scotland, took the chair of physiology at Aberdeen, and worked there until his death in 1935, badly crippled by arthritis at the end.
He is buried in Aberdeen. For decades his part in it was written down or written out entirely, and it took historians most of a century to put him back where he belonged.
A Perthshire manse. A Scottish medical education. A quiet man who made room for somebody else's idea. π΄σ §σ ’σ ³σ £σ ΄σ Ώ
Every insulin pen in the world traces back to a room he opened.
