Howard Florey

Howard Florey (1898-1968), Australian pathologist, co-discoverer of penicillin, and Nobel laureate. Born in Adelaide, Australia, and educated in medicine at the University of Adelaide, he later studied and taught in England. In 1935 he was appointed director of the Dunn School of Pathology, University of Oxford. Florey studied naturally occurring antibacterials, of which the Penicillium mould discovered by Alexander Fleming seemed the most promising. In 1939 Florey and the German-born British biochemist Ernst Boris Chain isolated the active agent, penicillin, from a fraction of the mould and formulated procedures for extraction and production. With British industries affected by World War II, Florey took his process to the United States, where private and government laboratories produced sufficient quantities to combat bacterial infection in wounded soldiers. For his work he was knighted in 1944, shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1945 with Chain and Fleming, was elected president of the Royal Society in 1960, and was created a life peer in 1965.