Howard Florey – Biography of Howard Florey

Born September 24, 1898, Adelaide, Howard Walter Florey, Baron Florey was an Australian pathologist who, together with Ernst Boris Chain, isolated and purified penicillin (discovered in 1928 by Sir Alexander Fleming) for general clinical use. For this research, Florey, Chain, and Fleming shared the 1945 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

His first studies were at St. Peter’s College, Adelaide, after which he went to the University of Adelaide, where he graduated from MB, BS in 1921. He was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to Magdalen College, Oxford, which led to the titles of B.Sc. and MA (1924). He then went to Cambridge as a student of John Lucas Walker. In 1925 he visited the United States with a Rockefeller Traveling Fellowship for one year, returning in 1926 with another scholarship to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he received his Ph.D. in 1927. He also held the Freedom Research Fellowship at London Hospital at this time. In 1927 he was appointed Huddersfield Professor in Special Pathology at Cambridge. In 1931 he succeeded Joseph Hunter in the Chair of Pathology at the University of Sheffield.

Leaving Sheffield in 1935, he became a professor of pathology and a fellow at Lincoln College, Oxford. He was made an honorary member of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge in 1946 and an honorary member of Magdalen College, Oxford in 1952. In 1962 he was appointed provost of Queen’s College, Oxford.

During World War II he was made an honorary consultant in pathology to the army and in 1944 he became a visiting professor at Nuffield in Australia and New Zealand.

His best-known work dates from his collaboration with Ernst Boris Chain, which began in 1938 when they conducted a systematic investigation of the properties of natural antibacterial substances. Lysozyme, an antibacterial substance found in human saliva and tears, was his original interest, but his interest shifted to substances now known as antibiotics. The work on penicillin was the result of this interest.

Penicillin had been discovered by Alexander Fleming in 1928 as a result of observations in a mold that developed on some germ culture dishes, but the active ingredient was not isolated. In 1939, Florey and Chain led a team of British scientists, funded by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, whose efforts led to the successful small-scale manufacture of a drug from the liquid broth in which it grows. In 1940 a report was published describing how penicillin was discovered to be a chemotherapeutic agent capable of killing sensitive germs in a living body. Subsequently, great efforts were made, with government assistance, to allow sufficient quantities of the drug to be made for use in World War II to treat war wounds.

Florey was a contributor to and editor of Antibiotics (1949). He also co-authored a conference book on general pathology and published numerous articles on physiology and pathology.

The Dr. Florey received many honors. These include the Lister Medal from the Royal College of Surgeons, the Berzelius Medal from the Swedish Medical Society, the Royal and Copley Medals from the Royal Society, the US Army Medal of Merit, and many others.

He was president of the Royal Society since 1960 and a member of the Royal College of Physicians, and among other honorary scholarships he holds is that of the Royal Australian College of Physicians.

He received honorary degrees from seventeen universities and was a member or honorary member of many academic societies in the field of medicine and biology.

In 1944 he was appointed Sir.

He married Mary Ethel Hayter Reed in 1926. They had two children, Paquita Mary Joanna and Charles du Vé. Sir Howard Florey He passed away on February 21, 1968.