Howard Florey

Howard Walter Florey, Baron Florey of Adelaide and Marston (; 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 the discovery of penicillin and its curative effect in various infectious diseases".

Although Fleming received most of the credit for the discovery of penicillin, it was Florey and his team at the University of Oxford who made it into a useful and effective drug, ten years after Fleming had abandoned its development. They developed techniques for growing, purifying and manufacturing the drug, tested it for toxicity and efficacy on animals, and carried out the first clinical trials. In 1941, they used it to treat a police constable from Oxford.

He started to recover, but subsequently died because Florey was unable, at that time, to make enough penicillin. Later trials in Britain, the United States and North Africa were highly successful. A graduate of the University of Adelaide, Florey studied at the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and in the United States on a fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation. In 1935, he became the director of the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology at Oxford.

He assembled a multidisciplinary staff that could tackle major research projects. In addition to his work on penicillin, he researched many other subjects, most notably lysozyme, contraception and cephalosporins.