Banting (1891–1941)
1923 Physiology or Medicine
For the discovery of insulin.
The discovery of how to isolate insulin, the hormone that allows diabetic patients to combat excessive glucose in their blood, brought the Canadian Frederick Grant Banting and John James Richard Macleod the 1923 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
It was Banting, along with his assistant Charles H. Best, who was the first person to successfully extract insulin from the pancreas. The Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, which is responsible for attributing the Nobel Prize, decided, at Banting’s suggestion, to also recognize Macleod, who had been receptive to the idea and offered his facilities for research.
Born in Alliston, Ontario, Canada, Frederick Banting was the youngest of five children. He completed his high school studies in his hometown then moved to Toronto. Although he initially enrolled in theology, Banting soon transferred to medicine. He graduated in 1916 and immediately enlisted in the Canadian Army Medical Corps and was sent to France. He was wounded during the battle of Cambrai, and later received the Military Cross for heroism under fire.
After the war he served as a doctor in several communities until he completed his MD in 1922. By this time he had already taken an interest in diabetes and related his ideas to a receptive John Macleod, then a professor of physiology at the University of Toronto. Born in Scotland, Macleod had traveled the world since obtaining his honors degree in medicine in 1898. He had worked in Leipzig, London, Cleveland and Montreal before he met Banting.
Besides the Nobel Prize, both received various awards and honorary titles. Macleod left a vast body of published work for posterity. Both Banting and Macleod loved to paint, and Banting even participated in a government-sponsored painting expedition above the Arctic Circle.
Macleod lived with his wife, Mary McWalter, and Banting married twice, first to Marion Robertson, with whom he had a son before their divorce, and then to Henrietta Ball. When World War II began, Banting served as a liaison officer between the English and American medical services. He was killed in a plane crash in Newfoundland while on active service.
Banting and Macleod each received half of the prize.
Gustav Hertz (1887–1975)
1925 Physics
For their discovery of the laws governing the impact of an electron upon an atom.
Gustav Ludwig Hertz was not the first member of his family to distinguish himself in the field of physics. In the year he was born, his uncle Heinrich discovered the photoelectric effect and in 1888 demonstrated the existence of electromagnetic waves. Conducting experiments of great importance to radio technology, Heinrich Hertz gave his name to a unit of frequency.
The son of a lawyer, Gustav was born in Hamburg on the July 22, 1887. He began his academic studies at the University of Göttingen at the age of 19 and continued them at the universities of Berlin and Munich. He graduated in 1911, and two years later he was a research assistant at the Physics Institute of the University of Berlin.
In 1914 Hertz was mobilized and served in the trenches of World War I, where he was seriously wounded the following year. He returned to Berlin in 1917 as a teacher, and between 1920 and 1925 he worked in the physics laboratory of the Phillips incandescent lamp factory in Eindhoven.
In 1935 he was made head of the research laboratory at Siemens after resigning from his position as director of the Physics Institute of the Charlottenburg Technological University. He had held the position since 1928 and resigned for political reasons. However, he developed a method to separate neon isotopes, among other discoveries, while at the institute.
Gustav Hertz’s first professional experiments, conducted in 1913, were on the impact of accelerated electrons against the atoms of rarefied gases. Before being mobilized for the war, he dedicated much time and patience to the study of the ionization potential of various gases. The results of his research corresponded with Niels Bohr’s theory on atomic structure, which, in turn, applied the quantum theory drawn up by Max Planck — these three Nobel recipients provided the foundation for modern physics.
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