The First Insulin Injection was given to Leonard Thompson

Researcher John Macleod and chemist James Collip then began to help prepare insulin for human use. On January 11, 1922, Leonard Thompson, a 14-year-old boy who was dying of diabetes, was given the first human experimental dose of insulin.

Banting, Best, and colleagues (especially the chemist Collip) went on to purify the hormone insulin from bovine pancreases at the University of Toronto. This led to the availability of an effective treatment—insulin injections—and the first patient was treated in 1922.

In May, 1921, as Macleod took off for a holiday in his native Scotland, Banting and his assistant Charles Best began their experiments. By August they had the first conclusive results: when they gave the material extracted from the islets of Langerhans (called "insulin," from the Latin for "island") to diabetic dogs, their abnormally high blood sugars were lowered. Macleod, back from holiday, was still skeptical of the results and asked them to repeat the experiment several more times. They did, finding the results the same, but with problems due to the varying purity of their insulin extract.

Macleod assigned chemist James Bertram Collip to the group to help with the purification. Within six weeks, he felt confident enough of the insulin he had isolated to try it on a human for the first time: a 14-year-old boy dying of diabetes. The injection indeed lowered his blood sugar and cleared his urine of sugars and other signs of the disease. Banting and Best published the first paper on their discovery a month later, in February, 1922. In 1923, the Nobel Prize was awarded to Banting and Macleod for the discovery, and each shared their portion of the prize money with the other researchers on the project.