August Krogh

He married Marie Krogh (née Jørgensen, 1874–1943) in 1905. She was a renowned scientist in her own right and much of August Krogh's work was carried out in close collaboration with her.

August and Marie had four children, the youngest of whom, Bodil, was born in 1918. She too was a physiologist, and became the first woman president of the American Physiological Society in 1975. Bodil married another eminent physiologist, Knut Schmidt-Nielsen.

In 1922, August Krogh went on a lecture tour to North America after receiving the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. During this tour, he and his wife Marie, a doctor who was herself suffering from a type 2 diabetes, visited Toronto where the scientists Frederick Banting, Charles Best and John Macleod had just succeeded in manufacturing active insulin. Krogh received permission to manufacture insulin in the Nordic countries and joined forces with Hans Christian Hagedorn, a physician specialising in diabetes, to start the production of insulin in Denmark. This led to the establishment of Nordisk Insulinlaboratorium company in 1923.

In 1925, brothers Harald and Thorvald Pedersen, who were former employees of Nordisk Insulinlaboratorium, formed their own company, Novo Terapeutisk Laboratorium. Novo Terapeutisk Laboratorium (later Novo Industri) and Nordisk Insulinlaboratorium (later Nordisk Gentofte) competed until they merged in 1989 to become Novo.