and to Great Britain. While no claims for the effectiveness of the vaccine were made, it did no apparent harm and helped cement Connaught as a national public health centre in the minds of Canadian public health authorities. The Spanish flu crisis revealed the inadequacies of Canadian public health infrastructure at the time. As a direct result, the government of Canada created the Department of Health in 1919. The new department's Dominion Council of Health had FitzGerald as its key member and took over the work of Connaught Labs' Honorary Advisory Committee. In April 1920, Connaught was granted a U.S. license. In July of the same year, it became an independent unit within the University of Toronto governed by a separate "Connaught Committee" of the Board of Governors. Discovery and early development of insulin: 1921-1936 Peacemaking In 1921, the Ontario Royal Commission on University Finances reported that "the work of the Connaught Antitoxin Laboratories is analogous to that done in the Pasteur Institutes in France and Belgium and to that of the Lister Institute in London, with this advantage on the side of these Laboratories that the Connaught Antitoxin Laboratories are an organic part of the University, are self-supporting and provide funds and facilities for research in Preventive Medicine and also opportunity for graduate teaching in Public Health." That same year in the physiology laboratory two floors above FitzGerald's Connaught Labs office, Frederick Banting and Charles Best (medical scientist) under the auspices of J.J.R. Macleod successfully extracted insulin from the pancreas of dogs, fetal calves, and adult cows. In particular, Banting's experimental work with calf pancreas tissue took place at Connaught's farm site, where calves were involved in smallpox vaccine production. FitzGerald had arranged access to Connaught's modest facilities, along with $5,000 from the Labs' reserves, to expedite the team's work. In the months that followed, the researchers worked to refine the extracts to a degree safe for human injection with the help of biochemist James Collip. Tensions mounted during this time between the four "co-discovers" of insulin, exacerbated greatly by Collip's suggestion that he could return anytime to Alberta with his purification work and patent it. FitzGerald therefore stepped in as peacemaker to prepare a seminal research and development agreement between the Connaught Laboratories and the researchers. It established two key conditions: 1) that the collaborators would sign a contract agreeing not to take out a patent with a