(1876–1935). Scottish physiologist J.J.R. MacLeod was one of the scientists who discovered the blood sugar regulator insulin, which is used to control diabetes. For this contribution to science, he and colleague Frederick Grant Banting received the 1923 Nobel prize for physiology or medicine.
John James Rickard MacLeod was born on Sept. 6, 1876, in Cluny, near Dunkeld, Scotland. Soon after his birth, MacLeod’s minister father moved the family to Aberdeen. There MacLeod went to public schools and continued on to the University of Aberdeen. He held posts in physiology and biochemistry at the London Hospital from 1899 to 1902 and then, after marrying in 1903, moved to the United States and taught physiology at Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, for 15 years. While at Western Reserve, he began to study the body’s carbohydrate metabolism. Out of these inquiries came the scholarly work Diabetes: Its Physiological Pathology (1913).
MacLeod joined the faculty of the University of Toronto in 1918 as associate dean of medicine and subsequently became director of its physiological laboratory. Although he did work in several areas while at Toronto, in 1921 he began to concentrate on the study of diabetes and the regulation of blood sugar levels by the human body. MacLeod appointed Frederick Banting to investigate a cluster of cells in the pancreas known as the islets of Langerhans that MacLeod thought might contain the sugar regulator that he was seeking. Together with another young scientist, Charles Herbert Best, they were able to isolate such a substance, and through clinical trials they were able to prove that the substance, now called insulin, was a safe and effective treatment for diabetes. The following year, MacLeod and Banting were awarded the Nobel prize for their discovery. MacLeod later became chairman of the physiology department at the University of Aberdeen. He died in Aberdeen on March 16, 1935.