Month: October 2024

Whilst attending the unveiling of a new memorial in Duthie Park, Aberdeen to the scientists who in 1922 developed the first medically useable insulin, I got my chance to say thank you to one of them – native of Aberdeen and later, Professor of Physiology at the University of Toronto, John James Rickard Macleod. (Incidentally, that’s my insulin pen in my hand, not a vape I’m offering him.)

The following day on a return visit to the park, a sudden bout of hypoglycaemia in close proximity to Macleod’s statue resulted in a letter about his work in the Financial Times…ah well, as they say, every cloud….

At the start of September, I was honoured to be invited to a ceremony attended by delegates from Toronto, the Canadian Consul for Scotland, dignitaries from the City of Aberdeen, and representatives from the Nobel Foundation at which a new memorial was unveiled in Duthie Park, Aberdeen which is truly a world first. It is the first and only memorial to date which names all four members of the team of Toronto-based scientists who, in 1922, developed the first medically useable insulin.

One of these was John James Rickard Macleod who was a native of Aberdeen but had become Professor of Physiology at the University of Toronto where, in 1923, he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with his colleague Fred Banting for their work on insulin. But following the award of the prize, what had already been a strained and often acrimonious relationship with Banting deteriorated even further with the result that in 1928, Macleod returned to his home city of Aberdeen where in 2023 the John Macleod Memorial Statue Society commemorate his vital contribution to medicine by unveiling a statue by local sculptor John McKenna in Duthie Park.