Howard Florey - Biography

Biography

Born the youngest of five children in Adelaide, South Australia, Howard Florey was educated at St Peter's College, Adelaide, where he was a brilliant student and junior sportsman. He studied medicine at the University of Adelaide from 1917 to 1921. At the university he met Ethel Reed, another medical student, who became both his wife and his research colleague. A Rhodes Scholar, he continued his studies at Magdalen College, Oxford, receiving the degrees of BA 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 the University of Cambridge.

After periods in the United States and at 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.

In 1941, they treated their first patient, Albert Alexander, who had been scratched by a rose thorn and was now suffering from severe facial infections. His whole face, eyes and scalp were swollen to the extent that he had had an eye removed to relieve some of the pain. Within a day of being given penicillin, he started recovering. However the researchers did not have enough penicillin to help him to a full recovery, and he relapsed and died. Because of this experience, the researchers changed their focus to children, who did not need such large quantities of penicillin.

Florey's 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 the project was originally driven by scientific interests, and that the medicinal discovery was a bonus:

People sometimes think that I and the others worked on penicillin because we were interested in suffering humanity. I don't 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. —Howard Florey, Baron Florey, Developing penicillin was a team effort, as these things tend to be —Howard Florey, Baron Florey

Florey shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1945 with Ernst Boris Chain and Alexander Fleming. Fleming first observed the antibiotic properties of the mould that makes penicillin, but it was Chain and Florey who developed it into a useful treatment.

While he considered himself to be an agnostic, he was not aggressive in his disbelief.

He was openly concerned about the population explosion resulting from improving healthcare, and was a staunch believer in contraception.

After the death of his wife Ethel, he married his long-time colleague and research assistant Dr. Margaret Jennings in 1967. He died of a heart attack in 1968 and was honoured with a memorial service at Westminster Abbey, London.