Insulin

Banting, Best, Collip, Macleod, Canada, patent of 1923. Patented for one dollar so it could save everyone.

Overview

Toronto's team isolated insulin in 1921 and patented it in 1923 for one dollar each, licensing royalty-free to universities and Eli Lilly for scale. Before 1922, diabetes was a death sentence; after, a manageable condition. The patent's stated aim was preventing unscrupulous monopolization. Lilly and Nordisk industrialized extraction then synthesis. A century later insulin pricing is a scandal precisely counter to that one-dollar ideal. The 1923 patent remains medicine's moral benchmark.