Biography of Howard Florey
Howard
Florey was born on the 24th of the 9th 1898 in Adelaide, Australia
but
his Dad was from England. Howard was excellent at school work and
was
superb at sport. While he was at school he was inspired by his
high school
chemistry teacher to study medicine at the University of Adelaide. At the
University of Adelaide he met Ethel, a fellow
medical student.
In 1921 he won the South Australian Rhodes Scholarship, he won it for his great
leadership and determination in academia and sport. Ethel moved to England in
1926 to marry him, they had an unhappy marriage
partly due to poor health and
hearing and his intolerance.
During
the 1930s Florey gathered a group of scientists at the Oxford
University
in Britain, his team began a careful study of the
properties of anti-bacterial
substances the are put together by
mould. One of the members of the team,
Ernst Chain, found an article
about Alexander Fleming’s work while flicking
through a medical and this prompted them to begin looking at penicillin.
Individually,
some of the members of the group concentrated on areas which
they had
the most knowledge about, but they met together and exchanged
ideas.
Chain worked on purifying penicillin with Edward Abraham. Norman
Heatley improvised methods for extracting penicillin using ether and
bedpans,
A.D. Garder and Jena Orr-Ewing studied how penicillin
reacted with other
systems
On
Saturday 25th of May 1940 Florey’s team tested penicillin on eight
mice
which were injected with a lethal dose of the streptococci
bacteria, four of
them were injected with penicillin as well. The
next day the four mice that
weren’t injected with penicillin died.
The first patient to used penicillin had
been scratched with a rose
thorn and his whole face was swollen in 1941. But
sadly he died
because the team didn’t use enough. In 1966 Ethel died, the year
after Howard got married again Margaret Jennings. Margaret Jennings
was an
important member of the penicillin team. In 1968 Howard died of a heart attack
at the age of 69.
