Insulin Trivia
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53 free Insulin trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
Insulin is the hormone that turned type 1 diabetes from a death sentence into a manageable condition, and its story is full of good trivia. This quiz covers the biology first: which cells make it, what it does to blood sugar, its 51 amino acids and two chains, the rival hormone glucagon, and why pig insulin worked so well for humans. Then it follows the discovery from Paul Langerhans's islets and Minkowski's diabetic dog to Nicolae Paulescu's overlooked extract and the famous Toronto summer of 1921: Banting's idea, the coin toss that picked Charles Best, Collip's purification, the dying teenager who got the first shot in January 1922, and the patent sold to the university for one dollar. It also covers what came after: the 1923 Nobel Prize and who shared their money with whom, Eli Lilly and mass production, Sanger's sequence, Hodgkin's 3-D structure, Yalow's assay, the first recombinant insulin from E. coli and Humulin in 1982, rapid and long-acting analogues, insulin coma therapy in psychiatry, the backpack pump of the 1960s, and why World Diabetes Day falls on 14 November. Easy questions ask which organ makes insulin; the expert tier asks for names, dates and molecules. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on insulin, insulin as a medication, Frederick Banting and related pages, and the supporting sentence is attached to each question. If you like this, try our quizzes on the human body, medicine and Nobel Prize winners.
30 of 53 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which British prime minister takes daily insulin injections for diabetes?
Theresa May
Theresa May was first diagnosed with the wrong type of diabetes, and only later did tests show she had type 1.
Q 02Before insulin, which extreme treatment did Frederick Allen use to stretch diabetic patients' lives?
Starvation diets
Starvation diets kept some patients alive longer before insulin, but some starved to death.
Q 03Which hormone from the alpha cells raises blood sugar, the opposite of insulin?
Glucagon
Glucagon makes the liver break down its stored glycogen and release glucose into the blood when sugar levels run low.
Q 04Some athletes misuse insulin in hopes of doing what?
Bulking up
Bulking up: but the gamble is dangerous, because too much insulin can drop blood sugar so low that the user loses consciousness.
Q 05What destroys the insulin-producing cells in type 1 diabetes?
An autoimmune reaction
An autoimmune reaction turns the immune system against the insulin-making cells, and warning antibodies usually appear years before symptoms.
Q 06Which animal's insulin is closest to human insulin and long treated diabetics?
Pig
Pig insulin differs from ours by a single amino acid, so drugmakers once turned pork insulin into exact human insulin by swapping that one unit.
Q 07Which Berlin medical student first described clusters of cells in the pancreas in 1869?
Paul Langerhans
Paul Langerhans had already found, as a student in 1868, skin cells that also bear his name and later proved to be part of the immune system.
Q 08What did Minkowski and von Mering find in 1889 after removing a healthy dog's pancreas?
Sugar in its urine
Sugar in its urine showed the dog had developed diabetes, sending researchers hunting for the missing substance the pancreas must make.
Q 09Who coined the word 'insulin' for a then-hypothetical islet hormone?
Edward Sharpey-Schafer
Edward Sharpey-Schafer didn't know that Jean de Meyer had already proposed 'insuline' for the same substance in 1909.
Q 10Which Romanian physiologist normalised a diabetic dog's blood sugar with an extract in 1916?
Nicolae Paulescu
Nicolae Paulescu had to close his lab when troops occupied Bucharest in 1916, so his extract results weren't published until 1921.
Q 11What structure do most insulins form that delays their entry into the blood?
Hexamers
Hexamers must slowly break apart into single molecules before entering the blood, so fast-acting analogues are built to come apart quickly.
Q 12How was Charles Best chosen over Clark Noble as Banting's assistant in 1921?
By a coin toss
By a coin toss, as the famous story goes, though Best himself later called the tale newspaper fiction.
Q 13What did Frederick Banting propose tying off in dogs so their digestive tissue withered but the islets survived?
The pancreatic ducts
The pancreatic ducts: Banting thought digestive juices were destroying the hormone, so he wanted the tissue making them to waste away first.
Q 21Which drug giant sold Exubera, the first inhaled insulin to reach the market?
Pfizer
Pfizer launched Exubera in 2006, but poor sales led it to pull the product the following year.
Q 22Which two men won the 1923 Nobel Prize for insulin, leaving Charles Best out?
Banting and Macleod
Banting and Macleod won, and Banting, furious that Best had been left out, gave half his prize money to him.
Q 23When a lack of insulin becomes an emergency, what can a person's breath smell like?
Fruit
Fruit: without enough insulin the body makes acetone, and breathing it out gives the breath a fruity smell.
Q 14Which drug giant grew from the insulin lab August Krogh founded in Denmark after his wife got diabetes?
Novo Nordisk
Novo Nordisk grew from that lab: Krogh had detoured to Toronto during a US lecture tour and came home with permission to make insulin.
Q 15Which animals' pancreases gave Banting a faster source of insulin from November 1921?
Fetal calves
Fetal calves hadn't yet begun making the digestive enzymes that Banting believed destroyed insulin.
Q 16Which biochemist purified the extract enough for human use in January 1922?
James Collip
James Collip worked day and night for 12 days to purify the extract after the first patient's allergic reaction.
Q 17Who received the first insulin injection, at Toronto General Hospital on 11 January 1922?
Leonard Thompson
Leonard Thompson's first dose was so impure that it caused an allergic reaction, but a purer one 12 days later worked.
Q 18In 1922, when she began insulin treatment, Elizabeth Hughes was the daughter of which serving official?
The US Secretary of State
Her father, US Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes, had nearly become President himself, losing the 1916 election to Woodrow Wilson.
Q 19Which drug company began mass-producing insulin with the Toronto team in 1922?
Eli Lilly
Eli Lilly's chemist George Walden devised a precipitation method that made insulin far purer and more plentiful.
Q 20For how much was the insulin patent assigned to the University of Toronto in 1923?
One dollar
One dollar was the price, and Banting said insulin belonged to the world, not to him.
Q 24Insulin resistance, where cells stop responding properly to insulin, is the hallmark of which condition?
Type 2 diabetes
Type 2 diabetes begins when muscle, fat and liver cells respond poorly to insulin, and the body can't make enough extra to compensate.
Q 25Which British biochemist sequenced insulin's amino acids?
Frederick Sanger
Frederick Sanger chose insulin partly because it was one of the few proteins that could be bought in pure form.
Q 26In whose laboratory was insulin's complete 3-D structure solved in 1969?
Dorothy Hodgkin
Dorothy Hodgkin got her first insulin crystal in 1934, but X-ray methods of the day couldn't yet handle a molecule so large and complex.
Q 27Who won the 1977 Nobel Prize for developing the radioimmunoassay for insulin?
Rosalyn Yalow
Rosalyn Yalow developed the assay with Solomon Berson, but he died in 1972, and Nobel Prizes can't be awarded posthumously.
Q 28Researchers from which country achieved synthetic crystalline bovine insulin in 1965?
China
China's team later had one member nominated for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, but the nomination was unsuccessful.
Q 29In which bacterium was the first recombinant human insulin produced in 1978?
E. coli
E. coli bacteria were given man-made genes for insulin's A and B chains separately, and scientists then mixed the chains to form insulin.
Q 30Under what brand name was the first biosynthetic human insulin sold?
Humulin
Humulin offered a steady supply that didn't need animal pancreas, when about two tons of it could yield only a few hundred grams of insulin.