Getting your questions ready
Getting your questions ready
Beat the crowd
10 questions No timer
60 free Insulin trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 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 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which islet cell type produces insulin?
Beta
Their neighbours, the alpha cells, secrete the opposing hormone glucagon.
Q 02From which Latin word does the name 'insulin' derive?
Insula, meaning island
The name refers to the islets of tissue that make it.
Q 03What effect does insulin have on blood glucose?
It lowers it
It promotes glucose uptake into liver, fat and muscle cells, where it becomes glycogen or fat.
Q 04Which hormone from the alpha cells raises blood glucose, the opposite of insulin?
Glucagon
It triggers the liver to break down glycogen and make new glucose.
Q 05How many amino acids make up the human insulin protein?
51
They form an A-chain and a B-chain linked by disulfide bonds.
Q 06What destroys the insulin-producing cells in type 1 diabetes?
An autoimmune reaction
In type 2 the beta cells decline for other reasons and tissues become insulin resistant.
Q 07Which animal's insulin is closest to human insulin and long treated diabetics?
Pig
Cattle insulin was also widely used before biosynthetic human insulin arrived.
Q 08Which Berlin medical student identified the pancreas's 'little heaps of cells' in 1869?
Paul Langerhans
The islets that bear his name make insulin; their function was unknown to him.
Q 09What did Minkowski and von Mering find in 1889 after removing a healthy dog's pancreas?
Sugar in its urine
It was the first proof of a link between the pancreas and diabetes.
Q 10Who coined the word 'insulin' in 1916 for a then-hypothetical islet hormone?
Edward Sharpey-Schafer
Jean de Meyer had proposed the near-identical 'insuline' in 1909.
Q 11Which Romanian physiologist normalised a diabetic dog's blood sugar with an extract in 1916?
Nicolae Paulescu
Many argue he deserved a share of the 1923 Nobel Prize.
Q 12What structure do most insulins form that delays their entry into the blood?
Hexamers
Rapid-acting analogues are engineered not to, so they act within minutes.
Q 13How was Charles Best chosen over Clark Noble as Banting's assistant in 1921?
By a coin toss
Banting kept him all summer and later shared his Nobel money with him.
What did Banting propose tying off in dogs so the pancreas would atrophy, sparing the islets?
Q 21For how much was the insulin patent assigned to the University of Toronto in 1923?
One dollar
The aim was to stop anyone else securing a profitable monopoly.
Q 22Which public health lab brokered the 1922 non-patent agreement among the discoverers?
Connaught Laboratories
Its director John FitzGerald acted as peacemaker.
Q 23Which two men were awarded the 1923 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for insulin?
Banting and Macleod
Banting, furious that Best was left out, split his money with him; Macleod split his with Collip.
The pancreatic ducts
He jotted the idea down in October 1920 after reading about duct blockages.
Q 15By how much did the first extract, 'isletin', cut a diabetic dog's blood sugar in an hour?
40%
Macleod insisted the experiment be repeated with more dogs and better equipment.
Q 16From which animals did Banting take pancreases to skip the weeks of duct-tying?
Fetal calves
Their pancreases had not yet developed digestive glands; adult cow pancreas followed.
Q 17Which biochemist purified the extract enough for human use in January 1922?
James Collip
Banting and Best regarded him as an interloper and he soon left the project.
Q 18Who received the first insulin injection, at Toronto General Hospital on 11 January 1922?
Leonard Thompson
The impure first dose caused an allergic reaction; a refined dose 12 days later worked.
Q 19Elizabeth Hughes, an early American insulin patient, was the daughter of which official?
The US Secretary of State
Charles Evans Hughes later became Chief Justice.
Q 20Which drug company began mass-producing insulin with the Toronto team in 1922?
Eli Lilly
Its chemist George Walden used isoelectric precipitation to refine it.
Q 24Which American physician pinned diabetes on damage to the pancreatic islets in 1901?
Eugene Opie
Zuelzer, Scott and Kleiner all then tried and failed to isolate the islets' secretion.
Q 25Who first produced insulin in crystallised form, in 1926?
John Jacob Abel
Its protein nature was fully proven when amino acids were isolated from it in 1935.
Q 26Which British biochemist sequenced insulin's amino acids, winning the 1958 chemistry Nobel?
Frederick Sanger
He later won a second chemistry Nobel for DNA sequencing.
Q 27In whose laboratory was insulin's complete 3-D structure solved in 1969?
Dorothy Hodgkin
She had won the 1964 chemistry Nobel for crystallography.
Q 28Who won the 1977 Nobel Prize for developing the radioimmunoassay for insulin?
Rosalyn Yalow
She was only the second woman to win the medicine prize.
Q 29Researchers from which country achieved synthetic crystalline bovine insulin in 1965?
China
Labs in Pittsburgh and Aachen made the first synthetic insulin around the same time.
Q 30In which bacterium was the first recombinant human insulin produced in 1978?
E. coli
Riggs and Itakura at City of Hope worked with Herbert Boyer of Genentech.