Howard Florey

Howard Walter Florey, Baron Florey (24 September 1898 – 21 February 1968) was an Australian pharmacologist and pathologist who led the Oxford team that turned penicillin from a laboratory curiosity into a usable drug, and shared the 1945 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Alexander Fleming and Ernst Chain.

He was born in Adelaide, South Australia, the son of a bootmaker. He took his medical degree at the University of Adelaide and went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar in 1922. After research posts at Cambridge and Sheffield, he returned to Oxford in 1935 as Professor of Pathology at the Sir William Dunn School.

From 1939 he assembled a team that included Chain, Norman Heatley and Edward Abraham to investigate antibacterial substances. They concentrated on the mould product penicillin that Fleming had described in 1928. By 1941 they had purified enough of the drug to treat their first patient, a policeman with a fatal infection, and during the Second World War Florey travelled to the United States to push large-scale fermentation production for Allied soldiers.

He served as Provost of The Queen's College, Oxford from 1962 until his death and as President of the Royal Society from 1960 to 1965. He was knighted in 1944, made a life peer in 1965 and appears on the Australian fifty-dollar note. He died in Oxford at the age of 69.

The given name Howard comes from the Norman French Huard, itself from the Old Germanic Hugihard, combining hugu meaning heart or mind with hard meaning brave or hardy. It became an English surname before turning into a first name. Howard Florey carried it through a research life that saved millions of lives, and he is remembered as one of the greatest medical scientists of the twentieth century.