January 11 Birthday
On January 11, 1922, Leonard Thompson, a fourteen-year-old boy dying of diabetes in a Toronto hospital, received the first injection of insulin. The extract, prepared by Frederick Banting and Charles Best, was crude and caused an allergic reaction, but within two weeks a purified version brought Thompson's blood sugar back to normal. Before insulin, a diagnosis of Type 1 diabetes was a death sentence. Patients were put on starvation diets that bought months, not years. Banting and his supervisor John Macleod received the Nobel Prize for the discovery in 1923. Banting was furious that Best was excluded and shared his half of the prize money with him. The patent for insulin was sold to the University of Toronto for one dollar. Banting said, "Insulin does not belong to me, it belongs to the world." A century later, insulin prices in the United States are among the highest in the world. Alexander Hamilton was born on this day in 1755 — or possibly 1757, as he himself was unsure. He was born on the Caribbean island of Nevis, illegitimate, and orphaned by twelve. He made his way to New Jersey, then New York, then into the Continental Army, where George Washington made him his aide. He wrote 51 of the 85 Federalist Papers, established the US financial system as the first Secretary of the Treasury, and was shot dead by Aaron Burr on July 11, 1804. His face is on the ten-dollar bill, which he would have found either appropriate or infuriating — he designed the entire banking system, and he is remembered primarily as the man who was killed in a duel. Clarence Darrow, also born this day in 1857, was the most famous defense attorney in American history. He defended Leopold and Loeb, the teenage killers who murdered a fourteen-year-old for the intellectual thrill of it, and saved them from the death penalty with a twelve-hour closing argument. He defended Scopes in the "monkey trial," arguing against William Jennings Bryan that the Bible should not be taught as science. He was a pacifist, an agnostic, and a tireless opponent of the death penalty at a time when that position was deeply unpopular. In 1935, Amelia Earhart became the first person to fly solo from Hawaii to California. The flight covered 2,408 miles and took eighteen hours. She had already been the first woman to fly across the Atlantic, as a passenger in 1928 and solo in 1932. Two and a half years after the Hawaii flight, she disappeared over the Pacific attempting to circumnavigate the globe. People born on January 11 fall under the zodiac sign of Capricorn. The birthstone is Garnet and the birth flower is Carnation. Historical events on January 11 include 1922: Insulin first used to treat diabetes in a human patient, 1759: First American life insurance company incorporated in Philadelphia, 1935: Amelia Earhart flies solo from Hawaii to California. Famous people born on January 11 include Alexander Hamilton (1755), Clarence Darrow (1857), Mary J. Blige (1971).