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Link to original content: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12473641
Almost famous: E. Clark Noble, the common thread in the discovery of insulin and vinblastine - PubMed Skip to main page content
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. 2002 Dec 10;167(12):1391-6.

Almost famous: E. Clark Noble, the common thread in the discovery of insulin and vinblastine

James R Wright Jr  1
Affiliations

Almost famous: E. Clark Noble, the common thread in the discovery of insulin and vinblastine

James R Wright Jr. CMAJ. .

Abstract

Clark Noble was one of the first members of the University of Toronto insulin team and came within a coin toss of replacing Charles Best as Frederick Banting's assistant during the summer of 1921. Noble performed important early studies helping to characterize insulin's action, and he co-authored many of the original papers describing insulin. Because mass production of insulin from livestock pancreata had proved elusive throughout 1922, J.J.R. Macleod hired Noble during the summer of 1923 to help him test and develop a new method for producing commercial quantities of insulin that Macleod believed would revolutionize insulin production. However, commercial production of insulin from fish proved impractical and was dropped by 1924, as methods to produce large quantities of mammalian insulin had improved very rapidly. Noble later played a small but critical role in the most important Canadian contribution to cancer chemotherapy research: the discovery of vinca alkaloids by his brother Robert Laing Noble. Although one might expect that a physician involved in 2 of Canada's most important medical discoveries during the 20th century must be famous, such was not Clark Noble's fate. He died without so much as an obituary in CMAJ.

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Figures

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Fig. 1: Before the discovery of insulin, Charles Best and Clark Noble were best friends and teammates on the Georgetown, Ont., baseball team, champions of the Peel–Halton Baseball League in 1920. Noble played first base and Best played catcher. Photo: Courtesy Henry Best
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Fig. 2: N.A. McCormick working on the wharf in St. Andrews, NB, with J.J.R. Macleod watching. McCormick worked at the St. Andrews Biological Station with Clark Noble during the summer of 1923 and returned in 1924, when this photograph was taken. Photo: Courtesy St. Andrews Biological Station
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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References

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    1. Banting FG, Best CH, Collip JB, Campbell WR, Fletcher AA. Pancreatic extracts in the treatment of diabetes mellitus. Preliminary report. CMAJ 1922; 12:141-6. - PMC - PubMed
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