 Aberdeen |
John James Richard Macleod lived from lived from 6 September 1876 to 16 March 1935. He was a doctor who won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1923. The wider picture in Scotland at the time is set out in our Historical Timeline.
John Macleod was born at Clunie in Perthshire, the son of the local church minister, the Rev Robert Macleod. He studied medicine at the University of Aberdeen, and graduated in 1898. He then spent a year at the University of Leipzig. In 1899 he became a demonstrator of physiology at the London Hospital Medical School, and three years later he was appointed a Lecturer in Biochemistry there. In 1903 he was appointed Professor of Physiology at the Western Reserve University at Cleveland, Ohio. He spent some of 1916 as Professor of Physiology at McGill University in Montreal and then, in 1918, accepted the post of Professor of Physiology at the University of Toronto in Canada.
Macleod's research focused on carbohydrate metabolism and resulted in the discovery that insulin could be used to treat diabetes. This led to his sharing the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1923. At the time there was controversy about whose work really led to the discovery of insulin, and there remains some suspicion that Macleod's co-awardee tried to write him out of the history books by claiming his role was less than accepted at the time. The fact remains that Macleod was awarded a share in the prize.
In 1928 John Macleod accepted the post of Regius Professor of Physiology at the University of Aberdeen. He continued to hold the post, together with that of Consultant Physiologist to the Rowett Institute of Nutrition and Health, part of the University of Aberdeen, until his death in 1935.
