Adelaide University medical graduate Howard Florey saves millions of lives with penicillin production

Howard Florey's statue on North Terrace near Adelaide University where he studied medicine.

Adelaide-born and educated Howard Walter Florey is regarded among the greatest figures of Australian science with a world-wide positive effect.

Pharmacologist and pathologist Florey shared the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in 1945 with Ernst Boris Chain and Alexander Fleming, for his role in making penicillin.

Although Fleming is credited with discovering penicillin, Florey turned penicillin into a useful drug available in quantities that saved an estimated 200 million lives.
Howard Florey had been educated at Kyre College Preparatory School (now Scotch College) and St Peter's College in Adelaide. Studying medicine at the University of Adelaide (1917-21), he met Ethel Reed, another student, who became his wife and colleague.

As a Rhodes Scholar, Florey studied at Magdalen College, Oxford. He later received a PhD from the University of Cambridge. After time in the United States and at Cambridge and Sheffield universities, Florey returned to Oxford in 1935, as professor of pathology and fellow of Lincoln College, leading a research team. In 1938, working with Chain, Norman Heatley and Edward Abraham, Flory read Fleming’s paper on the antibacterial effects of penicillium notatum mould.

Florey and Chain did the first clinical trials on penicillin in 1941 at Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford. His team enabled large-scale production of the mould. By 1945, penicillin was processed industrially for the Allies in World War II.

Florey was made a knight bachelor in 1944; awarded the Lister Medal in 1945 for contributions to surgical science; elected to the Royal Society in 1941 and became its president in 1958. In 1965, he was made Baron Florey of Adelaide in the State of South Australia and Commonwealth of Australia and of Marston in the County of Oxford.