Search results
Howard Walter Florey, Baron Florey, OM FRS FRCP (/ ˈ f l ɔːr i /; 24 September 1898 – 21 February 1968) was an Australian pharmacologist and pathologist who shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1945 with Ernst Chain and Sir Alexander Fleming for his role in the development of penicillin.
- Howard Walter Florey, 24 September 1898, Adelaide, South Australia
- Discovery of penicillin
- 2, including Charles du Vé
Mar 4, 2024 · Howard Walter Florey, Baron Florey was an Australian pathologist who, 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 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Sir Howard Florey was a British pathologist and biochemist who co-discovered penicillin with Chain. He was the President of the Royal Society and received many honours and awards, including the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1945.
- Florey’s Early Life and Education
- The Penicillin Project
- Chain: Scientific Genius
- Purifying Penicillin
- Testing Penicillin
- Production and Scaling Up
- The American Connection
- Synthesizing Penicillin
- Florey’s Later Research
- Chain and Later Projects
Florey was born in Adelaide, Australia, the youngest of five children and the only son of an English shoemaker who had immigrated to Australia hoping to save his first wife and two eldest daughters, who were suffering from tuberculosis. He established a boot and shoe factory, which prospered during much of Florey’s youth. From an early age Florey k...
After holding the first few positions in his career as an academic, he returned to Oxford in 1936 as the director of the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology. There he recruited an interdisciplinary group of scientists, a choice that reflected the various approaches to disease to which his education had exposed him—studies not just of the pathologi...
Chain, a recent immigrant to England, was of Russian-German-Jewish descent. He was quite confident in his own ability and had a volatile temperament that was bound to clash with Florey’s similarly quick temper. When Chain was only 13, his father, an industrial chemist, died. The family’s economic status declined precipitously, causing his mother to...
One of the projects pursued at the Dunn School was the crystallization of lysozyme—an enzyme discovered by Alexander Flemingin 1921 with antibacterial properties—and the characterization of its substrate—the location on bacteria to which it usually attaches. In 1938, while the lysozyme research was concluding and during a rare period of great camar...
In March 1940 Chain ran down to a laboratory that maintained test animals and requested that two mice be injected with a sample of the penicillin he and Abraham had extracted. Though the injection represented a far higher dosage than that administered in Fleming’s similar experiment, the mice survived apparently unharmed; the more concentrated peni...
Increasing production and yields now became of overriding importance. Because Penicillium mold requires air to grow, it was first surface-cultured in regular laboratory flasks. Soon all manner of vessels were being used, including hospital bedpans and hundreds of made-to-order ceramic pots. The operation quickly outgrew the space assigned to the Du...
Florey’s American connections served him well. The two English emissaries spent the Fourth of July weekend with a friend from his Rhodes year, who put Florey and Heatley in contact with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Northern Regional Research Laboratories (NRRL) in Peoria, Illinois, where large-scale fermentation processes were being activel...
Some chemists were confident that they would soon be able to synthesize penicillin from a few organic chemicals. This attitude resulted in a major effort conducted on both sides of the Atlantic to understand the structure of the penicillin molecule as the prerequisite for its eventual synthesis. At Oxford the problem of determining penicillin’s str...
With World War II over and the Nobel Prizes distributed to Fleming, Florey, and Chain for their work on penicillin, Florey continued to lead the lab at the Dunn School along the promising path of research into antibiotics. One of his group’s most famous accomplishments was the development of cephalosporin C in 1954. In this case Florey immediately ...
After World War II, Chain was eager to leave Oxford. Of the several career moves he considered, he ultimately chose the Istituto Superiore di Sanita in Rome. There he productively combined a biochemical research department and a fermentation pilot plant. In 1957 a consulting relationship with a group of scientists from the Beecham Group, who came t...
May 20, 2018 · Howard Florey was a British biochemist and microbiologist who transformed penicillin into a potent antibiotic in the 1940s. He shared the 1945 Nobel Prize in Medicine with Ernst Chain and Alexander Fleming for their discovery of penicillin. Learn about his life, education, research, and achievements.
Nearly a decade after the discovery of penicillin, an Australian physiologist, Sir Howard Florey (bottom middle; 1898-1968), and a German biochemist, Ernst Boris Chain (2nd row...
People also ask
Who was Howard Florey?
Who were Howard Florey and Alexander Fleming?
How did Howard Florey continue his medical studies?
What did Dr Florey do for a living?
Oct 10, 2023 · In fact, penicillin might still be languishing today if not for an English-Australian biochemist named Howard Florey. Florey looked like Clark Kent: strong chin, strong hair, spectacles. He worked in a hospital lab, and saw people dying every day of infections. He was determined to help them.
