Explore 11 January

Charles Best (left) and Frederick Banting, about 1924 (University of Toronto Library).

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Unknown author · Public domainResized and cropped for display.

A dying boy is the first person given insulin

Before 1922 type 1 diabetes was a death sentence; the only treatment was a near-starvation diet. At the University of Toronto, Frederick Banting and Charles Best, working in John Macleod’s laboratory, had extracted from dogs’ pancreases a substance that lowered blood sugar.

On 11 January 1922, at Toronto General Hospital, 14-year-old Leonard Thompson received the first injection. It had little effect, but after the biochemist James Collip purified the extract, his second course from 23 January worked. Within months insulin was being made in quantity, and it has since kept millions of people alive. Thompson lived another 13 years.

Titania, the largest moon of Uranus, photographed by Voyager 2 on 24 January 1986.

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NASA/JPL · Public domainResized and cropped for display.

William Herschel finds two moons of Uranus

In 1781 William Herschel, a German-born musician turned astronomer living in Bath, had discovered Uranus, the first planet found since ancient times. He went on building ever larger telescopes to study it.

On 11 January 1787 he identified two moons circling the planet, its largest. They were later named Titania and Oberon, after the fairy queen and king of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream; the planet’s moons have been named after literary characters ever since. Only Voyager 2, passing in 1986, showed their surfaces close up.

The cover of Smoking and Health, the 1964 report of the Surgeon General’s Advisory Committee.

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United States Public Health Service, Office of the Surgeon General; Surgeon General's Advisory Committee on Smoking and Health; National Library of Medicine, National Institute of Health · Public domainResized and cropped for display.

The US Surgeon General declares that smoking causes cancer

By the early 1960s about four in ten American adults smoked. Studies had been linking cigarettes to lung cancer for more than a decade, but the tobacco industry disputed them. In 1962 the Surgeon General, Luther Terry, set up a panel of ten experts, none of whom had taken a public stand on smoking, to review the evidence.

Their report, released on Saturday 11 January 1964, drew on more than 7,000 studies and concluded that smoking caused lung cancer in men and was the most important cause of chronic bronchitis. It made headlines across the country and led to health warnings on cigarette packets and, over the following decades, a long decline in smoking.

The original manifesto of Moroccan independence, dated 11 January 1944, with its signatures.

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Ahmed Bahnini, Ahmed el-Hamiani Khatat · Public domainResized and cropped for display.

Independence Manifesto Day in Morocco

On 11 January 1944, during the French protectorate, more than sixty Moroccan nationalists signed a manifesto demanding full independence under Sultan Mohammed ben Youssef and delivered it to the French authorities and to the Allied powers. It marked the turn from calls for reform to a demand for sovereignty, which came in 1956. Morocco keeps the anniversary as a public holiday.