The newspaper edited the insulin patent

Sat, 22 Aug 2026 18:57:53 -0400

On August 22, 1922, an Eli Lilly patent lawyer named George Schley noticed a problem in the newspaper.

Reports about Elizabeth Hughes’s dramatic treatment in Toronto identified Frederick Banting as an inventor of insulin. The pending American patent application did not. It named Charles Best and James Collip.

That was not a cosmetic omission. American law required the actual inventors to apply. As Schley warned, leaving Banting out could invalidate the patent and possibly amount to misrepresentation.

Banting had wanted his name omitted for an ethical reason: he thought it improper for a doctor to hold a patent on a medical treatment. The application was trying to honour that position. The press made the compromise difficult to sustain. A public story had become evidence that the private paperwork was wrong.

The eventual US patent names Banting, Best and Collip, and identifies them as assignors to the Governors of the University of Toronto. The researchers transferred their rights for one dollar.

That dollar is the part usually remembered. It makes the arrangement sound like a simple refusal to own insulin. It was nearly the opposite. The university needed the patent so nobody else could acquire a blocking monopoly, and so it could control licensing, production standards and distribution while manufacturers learned to make a difficult biological product reliably.

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The newspaper edited the insulin patent