Howard Walter Florey, Baron Florey,
OM,
FRS, (
September 24,
1898 –
February 21,
1968) was a
pharmacologist who shared the
Nobel Prize for
Physiology and
Medicine in
1945 with
Ernst Boris Chain and Sir
Alexander Fleming for his role in the extraction of
penicillin.
Born the youngest of five children in Adelaide, South Australia, Florey was a brilliant student (and junior sportsman, although he did not excel at maths) who was educated at St Peter's College, Adelaide. He went to study medicine at the University of Adelaide from 1917 to 1921. At the university he met Ethel Reed, another medical student who was to become both his wife and his research colleague. A Rhodes Scholar, he continued his studies at Magdalen College, Oxford, receiving the degrees of BSc and MA. In 1926 he was elected to a fellowship at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, and a year later he received the degree of PhD from Cambridge.
After periods in the United States and at the University of Cambridge, he was appointed to the Joseph Hunter Chair of Pathology at the University of Sheffield in 1931. In 1935 he returned to Oxford, as Professor of Pathology and Fellow of Lincoln College, leading a team of researchers. In 1938, working with Ernst Boris Chain and Norman Heatley, he read Alexander Fleming's paper discussing the antibacterial effects of Penicillium notatum mould. His research team investigated the large-scale production of the mould and efficient extraction of the active ingredient, succeeding to the point where, by 1945, penicillin production was an industrial process for the Allies in World War II. However, Florey held that its discovery came only as scientific merit, and that the medicinal discovery was only a bonus
'People sometimes think that I and the others worked on penicillin because we were interested in suffering humanity. I don¹t think it ever crossed our minds about suffering humanity. This was an interesting scientific exercise, and because it was of some use in medicine is very gratifying, but this was not the reason that we started working on it.'[1]
