The patent that could have made him rich sold for a dollar
The scientists who isolated insulin in 1921 gave away the patent almost for free, on principle — and it still saved millions.
In 1921, Frederick Banting and Charles Best, working in John Macleod's lab at the University of Toronto, isolated insulin from a dog's pancreas — the discovery that turned a death sentence, juvenile diabetes, into a manageable condition almost overnight. Two years later, Banting and Macleod won the Nobel Prize. Banting, furious that Best had been left off the citation, split his own prize money with him. Macleod, in turn, split his with the biochemist James Collip, who had helped purify the extract into something safe to inject.
The bigger decision came earlier. The team could have patented insulin and controlled its price for years. Instead they sold the patent to the University of Toronto for one dollar. Banting reportedly said it was unethical for a doctor to profit from a discovery that could save a life.
The dollar-patent gesture didn't make insulin cheap forever — modern manufacturers, formulations, and delivery devices are a different, more complicated story, and the cost of insulin in some countries remains a real and ongoing fight. But the founding decision was never in doubt: the people who found it decided, on the spot, that keeping it was worse than giving it away.