Today in History: Frederick Banting and Charles Best isolate insulin at the University of Toronto

The following are some of the major events to have occurred on July 27:

1921 – Canadians Sir Frederick Banting and Charles Best isolated insulin for the first time. It proved an effective treatment for diabetes.

1924 – Olympic Games conclude in Paris.

1949 – The British De Havilland Comet, the first jet-propelled airliner, made its maiden flight.

1953 – The Korean armistice was signed at Panmunjom, ending the three-year Korean War in which 1.6 million North Koreans and Chinese and over 118,000 United Nations troops died.

1980 – The deposed shah of Iran, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, died in exile in Egypt. He became shah in 1941 but was ousted in the Islamic Revolution of 1979 led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

1996 – A bomb exploded in an entertainment park during the Olympic Games in Atlanta, killing two people and wounding 110.

2002 – World’s worst airshow disaster in which 78 people were killed and over 100 injured when a Sukhoi Su-27 fighter jet crashed into a crowd of spectators at the Lviv military air show.

2003 – Bob Hope, British-born U.S. comedy legend, died aged 100. Hope was a master of timing who turned the one-liner into an art form and became a national institution.

2003 – World’s first glowing transgenic fish are exhibited in Taipei.

2005 – NASA halts future shuttle flights after chunk of insulating foam broke off Discovery’s external fuel tank during launch.

2008 – Film director Youssef Chahine, a leading light of Egyptian cinema for more than half a century, best known for his series of films linked to the Mediterranean city of Alexandria, died.

(Reuters)