The Man in the Moon

According to the B-52’s “There’s a Moon in the Sky, It’s called the Moon”. A lot of people have written songs about the moon. Probably since the dawn of man, we have been crooning about the moon. “Blue Moon” written by Rogers and Hart in 1934 has been recorded by through the decades by Louis Armstrong, Frank Sinatra, The Marcels, Sha Na Na, Chris Isaak, Cowboy Junkies and Rod Stewart, to name just a few. “Sugar Moon” is a Western Swing love song written by Bob Wills and Cindy Walker. It was first recorded in 1947 by Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys and was more recently covered by Asleep at the Wheel, who recorded it with four of the original Texas Playboys.


So many artists have been lunatics, inspired by the beautiful “Moonglow”, that there are just too many MOON songs to list. Cat Stevens was followed by a “Moonshadow”. Van Morrison wanted just one “Moondance”. The Police went “Walking on the Moon”. Creedence Clearwater Revival warned us about a “Bad Moon Rising”. And R.E.M. asked if you believe they put a “Man on the Moon”. I sure do, because I watched it live on TV back in 1969. When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were walking around up there, I remember walking outside with my grandfather and staring up at the moon. He said, “just think, people are walking on the moon for first time ever…that’s incredible”. It was a Bella Luna.

For my whole life, I have been staring up at the moon, looking at the face of the Man in the Moon, knowing that it is the same moon that every human that has ever lived has gazed upon. But, until today, I did not know who the real Man in the Moon was. Today I learned his name in Frederick Banting. Read on and I will explain.

The Man in the Moon is the figure resembling a human face that we see in the bright disc of the full moon. The figure is composed of the dark areas of the various Mare, or “seas”, and brighter highlands of the lunar surface. The dark areas look like the eyes and the mouth of the Man in the Moon. His eyes are Mare Imbrium and Mare Serenitatis, his nose is Sinus Aestuum, and his open mouth is Mare Nubium and Mare Cognitum.

In one of the eyes of the Man in the Moon, in the middle of Mare Serenitatis, is a relatively small, bowl-shaped impact crater called Banting, named after Frederick Banting, the principal scientist responsible for the discovery of insulin. Frederick Grant Banting was born on November 14, 1891 in Alliston, Ontario. He went to the University of Toronto to study divinity but changed his major to the study of medicine. World War I intervened and Frederick went to fight in France. He was wounded and was awarded the Military Cross for heroism under fire. When the war ended in 1919, Banting returned to Canada, studied orthopaedics and became Resident Surgeon at the Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto. From 1920 until 1921 he did part-time teaching in orthopaedics while maintaining his general practice.

In Toronto, Dr. Banting saw children with Type I diabetes and began studying the disease. He read the research papers of Dr. Oscar Minkowski who had found that diabetes was caused by lack of a protein hormone secreted by the Islets of Langerhans in the pancreas. However, early attempts to control the disease by giving patients pancreatic extracts failed. Banting believed that the protein insulin in the extracts was being destroyed by protein-digesting enzymes also found in the pancreas. The problem, therefore, was how to extract insulin from the pancreas before it was destroyed. Dr. Banting had a mission to figure it out.

One day, he read a journal article by Dr. Moses Baron, which demonstrated that, when the pancreatic duct was tied off, most of the cells of the pancreas degenerate, but that the Islets of Langerhans remain intact. By this time, Banting was working in the laboratory of John James Richard Macleod, with whom he would later share the Nobel Prize. Macleod was initially very skeptical, but eventually agreed to let Banting use his lab space while he was on vacation for the summer. He also gave Banting ten dogs for the experiments, and two medical student lab assistants named Charles Best and Clark Noble, before leaving for a delightful vacation in Scotland. Banting said he only needed one lab assistant, so Best and Noble flipped a coin to see which would help. Loss of the coin toss was unfortunate for Noble, because Best eventually shared the Nobel Prize money and fame for the discovery of the method to purify insulin. Banting and Best tied a string around the pancreatic duct in the dogs, waited several weeks for the pancreatic digestive cells to degenerate, then harvested the intact insulin-producting islet cells, and produced a new kind of extract. They tested the extract by re-injecting it back into some of the dogs. Those dogs survived for the entire summer, until Dr. Macleod returned from Scotland, and learned that Banting was correct, and had made a great discovery.

After the success with the dog experiments, they started giving the purified insulin to human patients. Banting and his colleagues knew that children were dying every day because of the disease, so from the initial dog experiments in the summer of 1921 to January 11, 1922, when a 14-year old boy named Leonard Thompson was given the first insulin injection, they had to work fast. In one of medicine's most dramatic moments, Dr. Banting and his colleagues went from bed to bed, injecting an entire ward of diabetic patients with the new purified insulin. Before they had reached the last dying child, the first few were awakening from their coma. Just imagine the relief and joy their parents and siblings must have felt. It was a miracle drug.

In 1923, Dr. Banting shared the Nobel Prize and the patent for insulin was sold to the University of Toronto for one dollar. This and other interesting information about the discovery of insulin was taken from www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulin . For the next 55 years, many lives would be saved by insulin purified from cow pancreas. In 1977, because of advances in molecular biology and genetic engineering, the first synthetic human insulin was made available, and it continues to be a miracle drug.

Dr. Frederick Banting died in a plane crash at age 49.

My daughter has Type I diabetes and takes insulin every day. Whenever I look up at the moon, I think of the Banting crater, and say “Thank You” to the real Man in the Moon.

Thank you Frederick Banting. God bless you.