Sir Howard Florey

Who is Sir Howard Florey?

Sir Howard Walter Florey, later Baron Florey, was born in 1898 in Adelaide, South Australia, and became one of the most important medical scientists of the twentieth century. A Rhodes Scholar, he studied at the University of Adelaide and then at Oxford, where he later became Professor of Pathology and led the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology. In the late 1930s and early 1940s Florey, together with Ernst Chain and their Oxford team, took Alexander Fleming's earlier observation of penicillin and turned it into a usable, mass-producible therapeutic drug, conducting the crucial purification, animal experiments, and first clinical trials. This work made antibiotics a practical reality and saved countless lives, especially during World War II. For this achievement Florey shared the 1945 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Fleming and Chain. He was later made a life peer and served as President of the Royal Society, and his portrait appeared on the Australian fifty-dollar note. He died in Oxford in 1968.

Sources: Australian Dictionary of Biography, entry 'Florey, Howard Walter (Baron Florey)' · The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1945 (official Nobel Prize records) · Encyclopaedia Britannica, entry 'Howard Florey'