Ernest L. Scott

Ernest Lyman Scott
Born	1877 Kinsman, Ohio
Died	1966
Scientific career
Fields	Physiology
Institutions	Columbia University
Doctoral students	Albert Baird Hastings

Ernest Lyman Scott (1877-1966) was an American physiologist and diabetes researcher who spent much of his career on the faculty at Columbia University. Scott's early work contributed to the modern understanding of the biology of insulin and its use in diabetes management, though the exact role and significance of his research in this context has been a subject of controversy. Later, Scott developed a standard blood test for diabetes. After retiring from Columbia in 1942, Scott went on to become a noted horticulturist.

Scott was born in 1877 in Kinsman, Ohio. He attended Ohio Wesleyan University as an undergraduate and received his B.S. in 1902. He received his M.S. from the University of Chicago in 1911, working with Anton Carlson, and left Chicago to begin his faculty career with a brief period teaching at the University of Kansas. In 1912 he moved to a teaching position at Columbia University. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia in 1914 and remained on the faculty until his retirement in 1942, briefly interrupted by World War I service with the American Expeditionary Force in France. His tenure at Columbia included the development of blood tests for blood glucose and characterization of standards for identifying diabetes by blood test. Among his notable graduate students is physiologist Albert Baird Hastings.

Scott's work with Carlson at the University of Chicago subsequently became a subject of controversy over the scientific priority of significant discoveries about insulin and diabetes, which earned Frederick Banting and John Macleod the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1923. Although Scott was only a master's student, he worked relatively independently in the Carlson laboratory, using dogs with surgically disrupted pancreas as animal models to measure his efforts to isolate a hypothesized anti-diabetic "active principle" found in pancreatic secretions. Evidence from his 1911 master's thesis suggests that he did successfully isolate a protein with observable clinical benefits in his experimental diabetic dogs, which by his description must have been insulin. However, Scott's thesis was not published in its original form until much later, in 1966. Instead, while departing for his new position in Kansas, Scott left his thesis with Carlson, who published a version in Scott's name in 1912 in the American Journal of Physiology.

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