The Insulin Patent Was Sold for a Dollar. Banting Thought a Doctor Shouldn't Be on It at All.

US1469994 was filed on January 12, 1923, and granted on October 9, 1923. Its title runs to a full sentence: "Extract Obtainable From the Mammalian Pancreas or From the Related Glands in Fishes, Useful in the Treatment of Diabetes Mellitus, and a Method of Preparing It." The inventors are Frederick G. Banting and Charles Herbert Best of Toronto and James Bertram Collip of Edmonton, and the rights went to the Governors of the University of Toronto.

Before insulin, a diagnosis of type 1 diabetes was close to a death sentence, and the main treatment was a starvation diet. On January 11, 1922, a boy named Leonard Thompson became the first person to receive an insulin injection in Toronto. Within two years Banting and John Macleod had a Nobel Prize. Banting shared his money with Best, and Macleod shared his with Collip.

The story of the patent is usually told in a sentence. The document says something more interesting.

Who would put their name on it

Medicine in 1922 was uneasy about patents. Macleod and Banting were physicians, and both believed that having their names on a patent would be contrary to the Hippocratic Oath. So in April 1922 the group settled on a workaround: Best and Collip, who were not physicians, would file, and assign the rights to the university.

That is visible in the American patent. It describes itself as a substitution in part of an application filed on May 22, 1922, by Collip and Best alone. The 1923 application that became the patent adds a name: Banting's. The document does not say why, and it is a detail the short version of the story leaves out. He objected to being on the patent, and the American patent has him on it.

One dollar each

The sale is real. Banting, Best and Collip assigned their rights to the University of Toronto for one dollar each, and the university's copy of the assignment shows the amount.

The motive was not simple generosity, and it was not only theirs. George Clowes of Eli Lilly advised Toronto to take out a defensive patent to keep out anyone hoping to profit from a crude or dangerous extract. The university's Insulin Committee could then license makers who met its standards. Lilly's chemist George Walden raised yields many times over, and by the 1930s Lilly's insulin sold for a small fraction of its first price. The University of Toronto Magazine reports a royalty rate of five percent, which later helped pay for research at Connaught Laboratories.

The quote

Banting is often quoted as saying that insulin belongs to the world, not to him. Scholarly reviews have repeated a version of those words, and they turn up every year in arguments about what insulin costs today. Snopes went looking for a source for the best-known version and could not find evidence that he said it.

It may be a fair summary of what he believed. The patent record shows something plainer: three researchers, one dollar each, a university trying to control quality, and a physician whose name ended up on the document he did not want it on.

See the original

The full text of US1469994 is on Google Patents.