Frederick Banting

In 1863, William Banting of London England perscribed dieting as a means of curing diabeties. The word "Banting" later became a Synonym for dieting. Dr. Frederick Banting of London Ontario later discovered a much more effective treatment for the same disease.

Frederick Banting was born on November 14, 1891 in Alliston, Ontario, Canada as Frederick Grant Banting. He was married to Henrietta Ball and Margaret Robertson.

Awarded the 1923 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine along with John MacLeod, a University of Toronto professor and diabetes expert who assisted him with the discovery of insulin. The two other doctors attributed with the discovery (Charles Best and J.B. Collip) were not named. Banting publicly expressed his anger regarding this situation and both he and Macleod split their award with Best and Collip.

Created the world's first G-suit to help pilots cope with high-speed flight. This led to his appointment in 1939 as the chairman of the National Research Council's Committee on Aviation Medical Research.

For Christmas of 1940 he made a radio broadcast that was sent as a message of encouragement to the Canadian troops overseas. This is the only recording of Dr. Banting's voice known to exist.

Always felt uncomfortable within the medical community of his day. As a mean of escaping this he befriended the now legendary Canadian artists The Group of Seven ( Franklin Carmichael, A.J. Casson, Lawren Harris Edwin Holgate, A.Y. Jackson, Arthur Lismer, Emily Carr and others ). Banting had always been an avid amatuer painter and his surviving canvases ( mostly landscapes ) bear a striking similarity to much of the Group of Seven's body of work.In the late 1990's one of his landscape painting was auctioned off by the Banting research center to raise funds for research.

Inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2004.