Howard Florey

Howard Florey was the first Australian to win the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. He shared the 1945 award with the German refugee chemist Ernst Chain and the Scottish microbiologist Alexander Fleming. Working together at Oxford University, Florey and Chain built a research team that transformed penicillin (discovered by Fleming in 1929) from a laboratory curiosity into a widely available drug.

Penicillin is one of the most efficient remedies ever discovered, and in the 1940s its effects seemed almost miraculous. It revolutionized medicine, allowing once-lethal infections--pneumonia, diphtheria, syphilis, meningitis, gas gangrene--to be cured. For infections that were resistant to penicillin, other antibiotics were soon found, including cephalosporin, which was also developed by the Oxford group.

Florey was born in Adelaide to a wealthy family. Rather than enter his father's shoe-making business, he resolved to study medicine, and in 1921 won a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford University. In the mid-1930s, he became intrigued by the problem of extracting pure penicillin from the Penicillium mold without destroying its potency. He later assembled a multidisciplinary team--including his wife Ethel--to work on manufacturing the drug. The technical difficulties of carrying out such a project in wartime Britain were enormous, and at first the team struggled to produce enough penicillin to cure a few infected mice. The amounts available to treat the earliest patients were so limited that the researchers concentrated the drug back from urine, then reinjected it. But (thanks in part to collaboration with well-funded U.S. researchers) by the time of the D-Day landings in 1944, penicillin was available in sufficient quantities to save the lives of many wounded Allied and German soldiers.

In his approach to practical science, Florey was a true experimentalist, and is credited with establishing the nexus between physiology (normal function) and pathology (disease) that defines the discipline of experimental pathology. "If you do the experiment you may not be certain to get an answer," he liked to say. "But if you don't do it, you can be certain not to get one." Despite a prickly personality (he addressed all but his closest kin by their surnames), he had a gift for collaboration, easily inspiring others with his dedication and his commitment to excellence. "I would work with the devil himself," he once said, "if he were good enough."

Florey believed it would be inappropriate to patent penicillin, but learned his lesson when some of his American collaborators did just that. His cephalosporin patent supported research at Oxford's Sir William Dunn School of Pathology for many years. It is a measure of the man that Florey took no profit for himself.

The Nobel and other accolades gave Florey great influence, which he used well. He visited Australia often, and his efforts were central to the establishment of the Australian National University as a postgraduate research university, a visionary idea for its time. Florey assumed responsibility for the initial phase of the ANU's John Curtin School of Medical Research, contributing greatly to the recruitment of a stellar group of founding professors. Though he continued living in England, he was chancellor of the ANU (making annual trips to Canberra), when he died at age 69 from cardiovascular disease. A typical Australian stoic, he suffered angina in silence for many years. Today, coronary bypass surgery would probably have given him a decade more of productive life.

Florey was a familiar figure to Australians of his time, but the 100th anniversary of his birth, in 1998, attracted little public interest, even in his home town of Adelaide. When I spoke there at a well-advertised event in his honor, the Crows football team were on a winning streak and the press seemed terminally obsessed with Sir Donald Bradman's 90th birthday. "Australia has not, so far, been looked on as a land of opportunity for the intellectual," Florey said in 1958. That is changing, but young Australians need to be reminded that their country has produced great achievers in science, the arts and the world of ideas. A sophisticated society can support a broad pantheon of heroes.

Peter Doherty and Rolf Zinkernagel won the 1996 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for their work on viral infections and immunity, carried out at the John Curtin School of Medical Research

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