Insulin- One of Canada's Greatest Inventions

Technology is everywhere! If you stopped and looked around you will see at least an invention or an innovation within 10 meters. There have been over half a billion patents given out; more than one million patents were awarded to Canadian inventors. In spite of that the National Science Literacy Survey showed that two thirds of Canadians aren't able to name even one Canadian inventor or any Canadian accomplishments! Throughout the past century and into the next millennium, the range of Canadian inventions reflects on how well the economy is going up for our great nation. Canada is a large country and innovating and inventing is precisely why Canada is on par with high economical countries such as: Britain, America, France and more. Coincidently, many Canadian made inventions have been in the fields of transportation and communications, while some field such as: medicine and science are slowly progressing. Others inventions have been made to contradict Canadian climate. Numerous technological advances have been accomplished in machinery associating in improving the way resources are excavated, due to the fact that this country is rich in primary resources or staples such as agriculture, wood, mining, and fish. However, since Canada is a rather new nation, many important achievements have either been built or improved upon, so it is hard to invent a worldwide usage invention. Although this doesn’t mean that Canada didn’t contribute to humanity. On the contrary, with inventions such as: the snowmobile, the discovery of insulin and the hockey mask are being used all over the world, as well as saving millions of lives every year. Over the past century, Canadian technology such as medical treatment, transportation, and technology have a...

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...rough occurred, with later research of insulin; the characterization of insulin’s amino-acid structure became the first synthetic insulin. Moreover it was produce almost simultaneously at both the University of Pittsburgh by Panayotis Katsoyannis and at RWTH Aachen University by Helmut Zahn in Germany in the early 1960s. In a similar manner Herbert Boyer invented the first genetically-engineered, synthetic human insulin by using Escherichia coli in a laboratory during the late 1970s. Thanks to Frederick Banting and Charles Best, In 1982 Eli Lilly and Company aided by Genentech (founded by Herbert Boyer) went to sell to Humulin: the first commercially available biosynthetic human insulin. The vast majority of insulin we currently use today is Humulin. Because of Frederick Banting and Charles Best discovery of insulin we now have a higher quality to save diabetics.