100 years ago, scientists predicted we’d live to 1,000 years old
When Frederick Grant Banting discovered how to isolate insulin from animals in 1921, the young Canadian doctor—a WWI veteran and former farm boy—changed the calculus of diabetes forever. Prior to the 1920s, the disease killed more than 80 percent of preteen diabetic children. Banting’s breakthrough replaced the sometimes toxic remedy goat’s rue, or Galega officinalis, a flowering plant with glucose-lowering properties derived from guanidine. His discovery came during a wave of medical optimism fueled by new scientific tools and knowledge that were rapidly unlocking the mysteries of human anatomy, disease, and aging. The foundations for this optimism had been building for decades. Germs were first discovered in the 1880s, ushering in the golden age of bacteriology and numerous life-saving vaccines. Vitamins got their name in the early 1900s when London-based Polish biochemist Casimir Funk—one of many scientists seeking cures for common diseases by linking them to vital nutrient deficiencies—combined “vital” and...