Who is credited with the discovery of Insulin?
Insulin is a hormone crucial for regulating blood sugar, and its discovery was a monumental achievement in medicine. Before insulin, a diagnosis of Type 1 diabetes was essentially a death sentence. While several scientists contributed to the research, John MacLeod, a Scottish physiologist, was the head of the laboratory at the University of Toronto where the crucial experiments took place in the early 1920s. He supervised the team that isolated and purified insulin from the pancreas of dogs. While Frederick Banting and Charles Best performed many of the experiments, MacLeod's leadership, resources, and expertise were vital to the success. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1923, which he shared with Banting. Although Banting felt that Best should have been awarded the prize instead of MacLeod, MacLeod shared his portion of the prize money with Best. The other names listed are significant in other fields: Patrick Steptoe was a pioneer of in vitro fertilisation, Ian Wilmot is known for cloning Dolly the sheep, and Mary Peters is a celebrated Northern Irish athlete.
The answer is a Scottish physician whose work has been life-saving to Diabetics, and his last name is synonymous with a common Scottish dog breed.