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 ...