Ben Gilbert: recommendation

Transcript context

…As we'll see, that's just the tip of the iceberg. This company is 100 years old. The history goes way back and is way more interesting than I think, just about anybody knows. Yup. Pharmaceuticals is without a doubt the most complex industry that we have ever studied. To fully understand Novo Nordisk, we need to go back to a simpler time before the Food and Drug Administration, before all this industry consolidation, healthcare oligopolies, and before there were treatments for everything we take for granted today, antibiotics, vaccines for polio, tetanus, measles, mumps, you name it, that is where we will start our story. If you want to know every time an episode drops, you can sign up at acquired.fm/email. These will also contain hints at what the next episode will be and follow up facts from previous episodes when we learn new information. Come talk about this episode with us after listening at acquired.fm/slack. If you want more from David and I, you should check out our second show, ACQ2, where we interview founders, investors, and experts often as follow-ups to the topics on these episodes. With that, this show is not investment advice. David and I may have investments in the companies we discuss, and this show is for informational and entertainment purposes only. David, where are we starting our story? We start in 1921, over a hundred years ago, in Toronto, Canada, with the discovery and extraction of the pancreatic hormone, Insulin by a laboratory group at the University of Toronto Medical School. Insulin, of course, as most of you know, regulates the absorption of glucose from the blood into the body. It's the main anabolic hormone in most, if not all animals in the world. Insufficient Insulin production in the body, of course, leads to the disease Diabetes. This group, if you could call it that, at the University of Toronto, is comprised of the physician Frederick Banting and the medical student, his assistant, Charles Best, along with a chemist and the head of the laboratory there and assistant medical school dean, John Macleod. There's a whole bunch of controversy around who actually deserves credit for the discovery of Insulin. The historical consensus at this point now being that it really was Banting and Best who did all the work. But nonetheless, two years later when the Nobel Committee awards them the 1923 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of Insulin, it is Banting and Macleod who get the award, not Best. This will come back up in a minute.…

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