Howard Florey’s Oxford: Producing Penicillin

In this video Rob Walters explores Howard Florey’s origins, then focuses on his life and activities in Oxford. It is to a large degree an Oxford eye view of the story of penicillin and the birth of antibiotics as a medical solution to many human ills.
Of course Oxford University has produced a long list of famous scientists, but surely one of the greatest must be Howard Florey. After all, he’s the man who headed an Oxford team of scientists that made penicillin a usable medicament and hence ushered in the era of antibiotics.
Florey was born and had his early education in Adelaide, Australia then won a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford University where he entered Magdalen College, studying under Charles Sherrington. This was followed by a scholarship in experimental pathology at Cambridge, then travel to the USA funded by a Rockefeller grant. Later he gained his PhD at Cambridge University which was followed by some years at Sheffield University as Professor of Pathology.
He returned to Oxford as both Professor of Pathology and as Fellow of Lincoln College. He lived near the University Parks and began to work with Ernst Chain. Together they identified penicillin as the most likely candidate to battle against the bacteria that so savagely attacked the human body. This decision was based on a paper by Alexander Fleming which described his accidental discovery of penicillin mould. In war-torn Britain they created a team which included Norman Heatley and others, and gradually began producing tiny quantities of penicillin and testing its efficacy on mice. The initial experiment was an unqualified success and they forged on to test its effect on diseased human beings at the Radcliffe Infirmary. The first was Albert Alexander who was fighting for his life against a murderous bacterial infection; the injections of precious penicillin caused a near miraculous recovery, but supplies of the precious antibiotic ran out and he died. Yet the penicillin had worked so Florey and Heatley set off on a tortuous journey to the USA to persuade drug companies such as Pfizer to step up into full scale production during World War 2 and by D-Day there was enough penicillin available to treat all of the injuries suffered by the Allied forces. Their work was recognised by the presentation of the Nobel Prize in Medical Science in 1945 and penicillin was shown to cure many bacterial diseases from anthrax through wound infections to syphilis.
Florey was awarded many glittering prizes including fellowships and doctorates: he also became President of the Royal Society. He continued to head the antibiotic team at the Oxford William Dunn School of Pathology until 1962 going on to discover another important antibiotic - cephalosporin C.
In later life he became Provost of the Queen’s College, Oxford in 1962 and died some years later in that position. He is remembered in Saint Nicholas Church directly opposite his home in Old Marston, Oxford and in Westminster Abbey. Also via the modernistic Florey Building which provides student accommodation on the eastern side of River Cherwell.