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2 leaves. Very Good. Letterhead: Banting and Best Department of Medical Research, Charles H. Best Institute, University of Toronto, Toronto 101, Canada. Charles Best thanks the children in Mr. Bean's class in Saco, Maine, for their holiday greetings and for sending him "your card, drawing, gifts, and clippings about the Field Day at Saco." Best advises the children "that it pays to do one's very best whether in sports or in anything we undertake. Listen carefully to all the things Mr. Bean talks about and almost unconsciously you will learn new facts every day. That is something we should all do, no matter what our age." Best is sending the children "a special card to wish each of you a very happy vacation. This card shows you a painting I did of Schooner Cove where we often spend our summers and this makes us almost neighbours because Schooner Cove is in the State of Maine too although at the northern tip while Saco is at the south." Charles Best's parents were Canadian, but Best was born in northern Maine, near the Maine-New Brunswick border, where his father had his medical practice. Best grew up in Maine before he went to the University of Toronto in 1915. I have no information as to what led the children in Mr. Bean's class in Saco, Maine, to write to Best in 1972. A guess might be that Mr. Bean taught the children about insulin and diabetes and that is what led them to write to Best. The Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine in 1923 was awarded jointly to Frederick Grant Banting and John James Rickard Macleod "for the discovery of insulin". Banting had done his research on diabetes and insulin in collaboration with Charles Best. Banting believed that Best should also have received the Nobel Prize, and so Banting shared with Best the money Banting had received with his Nobel Prize. "Best was not awarded a Nobel Prize. However, he did have the satisfaction of knowing that the 1972 official history of the Nobel Prize acknowledged that a mistake had been made in 1923. 'Although it would have been right to include Best among the prize-winners, this was not formally possible, since no one had nominated him--a circumstance which probably gave the Committee a wrong impression of the importance of Best's share in the discovery' " (quoted in Louis Rosenfeld, "Insulin: Discovery and Controversy", Clinical Chemistry, Volume 48, issue 12, 1 December 2002; this article can be read online for free). Seller Inventory # 17379
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