In he was appointed professor of pathology at Sheffield and then at Oxford in He is celebrated for making Alexander Fleming's discovery of penicillin into a clinically useable product, thus initiating the era of antibiotics. From Florey played a key role in setting up the John Curtin School for medical research in Australia.
In he was elected President of the Royal Society, the first Australian to hold the office. His first wife was Mary Ethel Hayter d. In he married Margaret Jennings who had worked with him since He died suddenly in Oxford on 21st February and is buried at Marston, near Oxford. Scientist; doctor. This image can be purchased from Westminster Abbey Library.
Designed by. British surgeon Joseph Lister noted that samples of urine contaminated with mould didn't allow bacteria to grow, but he was unable to identify the substance in the mould.
French medical student Ernest Duchesne successfully tested a substance from mould that inhibited bacterial growth in animals, but died at an early age in , never seeing the world's acceptance and use of his important discovery. After World War I, Alexander Fleming was conducting an experiment with bacteria when a tear fell from his eye into a culture plate. He later noticed that a substance in his tear which he named lysozyme killed the bacteria, but was harmless to the body's white blood cells.
Years later, Fleming was doing research on the flu when a similar coincidence occurred. While he was on holidays, a bit of mould had fallen into a discarded culture plate containing bacteria, forming a clear patch. When he returned he recognised this pattern from his previous experience with lysozyme. He concluded that the mould was producing an antibiotic substance and named the antibiotic penicillin, after the Penicillium mould that produced it.
His discovery was an amazing piece of luck. If Fleming hadn't left a petri dish of bacteria on his bench when he went on holidays; if he had properly disinfected the dish; if the weather had been different from the ideal conditions for bacteria and mould growth in the laboratory; and especially if Fleming hadn't the experience to recognise the importance of the observation, penicillin may not have been discovered as an antibiotic.
But Fleming couldn't extract the bacteria-killing substance, so he couldn't try it as a treatment for general infections. He moved on to other research - leaving Howard Florey and his team to pave the way for penicillin's use as a lifesaver more than a decade later.
Fabulous Fungus Penicillin was the first naturally occurring antibiotic discovered Prontosil, the first chemical used to cure certain infectious diseases, had been discovered in but had serious side effects. There are now more than 60 antibiotics, which are substances that fight bacteria, fungi and other microbes harmful to humans - the word means against anti life bio.
An antibiotic is a drug produced by microbes. Penicillin is obtained in a number of forms from Penicillium moulds. Penicillin G is the most widely used form, and is the one that killed bacteria during Duchesne's work in , Fleming's work in and Florey's work in Bacteria reproduce by dividing to produce two new cells.
They enlarge to about twice their size before the DNA chromosome is copied. The two new chromosomes move apart and a cell wall forms between them. But if penicillin is around the new cell wall won't be able to form. It doesn't harm old bacterial cell walls, it just stops new ones forming see Balloon bacteria.
This means the bacteria can't reproduce, so the disease can't spread. Natural penicillin is administered by injection, because if it's swallowed stomach acids destroy the drug before it reaches the bloodstream. One shot of penicillin these days is more than the entire amount used by Florey's team in all its clinical trials!
About one in 10 people is allergic to penicillin, showing symptoms ranging from minor rashes to serious breathing difficulties. If you're allergic to penicillin, there are now other antibiotics that can be taken as a substitute. Penicillin Production Florey's team worked under difficult circumstances with a lack of funding and equipment, but ensured penicillin production grew from the manufacture of a scarce and very impure brown powder to the commercial production of a purified and powerful antibiotic.
At first penicillin was made using old dairy equipment. Hospital bedpans were used to grow mould. Liquid containing penicillin was drained from beneath the growing mould and filtered through parachute silk on bookshelves.
But the team needed drug companies to help it produce the large amounts required for test patients. Companies in Britain were unable to help out on a large scale because of the war, so Howard Florey and Norman Heatley took a dangerous flight to the United States in a blacked-out plane across the Atlantic.
The trip was against the wishes of Ernst Chain, who wanted to first patent their ideas in Britain. This would have made the team very rich indeed, but it was thought in Britain at the time that patenting medical discoveries was unethical. A splendid experimentalist, he had no liking for speculation or abstract ideas.
He was intensely hard-working and expected the same devotion from his colleagues and students. Although he had no time for administrators—'paper-shufflers', as he called them—when thrust into senior administrative positions he proved to be an excellent chairman.
He was a man of vision and above all a man who got things done: 'few people can have made better use than Florey of eminence stemming from a major role in a great discovery'. Outstandingly successful as president of the Royal Society, London, he reorganized the institution, greatly expanded its research-professorship programme and secured magnificent new premises at 6 Carlton House Terrace.
As a boy and a young man, Florey had been good at sport and he continued to play tennis with enthusiasm into his fifties. Outside the laboratory, his main enjoyment was travel, and from his earliest days at Oxford he took every opportunity to go abroad, delving into the history, architecture, art and music of the countries he visited; he relished the extensive travel that he undertook as a result of the fame of penicillin and his connexion with the A.
He was an enthusiastic photographer; he relaxed with classical music; and in later life he found pleasure in painting and in cultivating a rose garden at his Marston home in Oxfordshire.
Florey had been elected a fellow of the Royal Society in , for work done before the practical use of penicillin had been demonstrated. Subsequently, the contributions of the drug to human health and well-being were so immense and so obvious that honours and awards were showered upon him. In he was created Baron Florey of Adelaide and Marston. That year he was appointed to the Order of Merit. Author or co-author of some two hundred scientific papers, Florey edited Lectures on General Pathology London, , which went through four editions, and co-authored the massive two-volume treatise, Antibiotics: A Survey of Penicillin, Streptomycin, and Other Antimicrobial Substances from Fungi, Actinomycetes, Bacteria and Plants Oxford, Survived by her, and by the son and daughter of his first marriage, he died of myocardial infarction on 21 February at his Queen's College lodgings and was cremated.
A memorial tablet was unveiled at St Nicholas's parish church, Marston, in , and a commemorative stone in Westminster Abbey was unveiled in November She worked with the Oxford Regional Blood Transfusion Service in , then took part in clinical trials of penicillin conducted at the Radcliffe Infirmary, at military hospitals and at the Birmingham Accident Hospital.
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