Howard Florey

HOWARD THE LORD BARON FLOREY d1968. Australian pharmacologist and pathologist who shared the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1945 with Sir Ernst Chain and Sir Alexander Fleming for his role in the development of penicillin. Although Fleming received most of the credit for the discovery of penicillin, it was Florey who carried out the first clinical trials of penicillin in 1941 at the Radcliffe in Oxford on the first police constable patient. The patient started to recover, but subsequently died because Florey was unable at the time to make enough penicillin. It was Florey and Chain who actually made a useful and effective drug out of penicillin, after the task had been abandoned as too difficult. His discoveries (along with the discoveries of Fleming and Ernst Chain) are estimated to have saved over 200 million lives. He is consequently regarded by the Australian scientific and medical community as one of its greatest figures. "In terms of world well-being, Florey was the most important man ever born in Australia". He died in Oxford aged 69 on February 21st 1968