129 Facts About Howard Florey

1.

Howard Walter Florey, Baron Florey 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 his role in the development of penicillin.

2.

Howard Florey started to recover, but subsequently died because Florey was unable, at that time, to make enough penicillin.

3.

Howard Florey assembled a multidisciplinary staff that could tackle major research projects.

4.

Howard Florey was involved in the founding of the Australian National University in Canberra and the establishment of its John Curtin School of Medical Research, and he served as Chancellor of the Australian National University from 1965 until his death in 1968.

5.

Howard Florey was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1941, and as its president from 1960 to 1965, he oversaw its move to new accommodation at Carlton House Terrace and the establishment of links with European organisations.

6.

Howard Florey's discoveries are estimated to have saved over 80 million lives, and he is regarded by the Australian scientific and medical community as one of its greatest figures.

7.

Howard Walter Florey was born in Malvern, a southern suburb of Adelaide, South Australia, on 24 September 1898.

8.

Howard Florey was the only son of Joseph Florey, a bootmaker from Oxfordshire in England, who as a boy moved to London where Florey's grandfather established a bootmaking business.

9.

Joseph Howard Florey's first wife was Charlotte Ames, with whom he had two daughters, Charlotte, who was born in 1880, and Anne, who was born in 1882.

10.

Joseph Howard Florey established his own bootmaking business in Adelaide, and married Berth Mary Waldham, the daughter of his housekeeper.

11.

Howard Florey later became a bacteriologist and a pioneer of laboratory medicine.

12.

Howard Florey attended Unley Park School, a local private school, taking the two-mile trip to school each day in a horse-drawn tram with Mollie Clampett, a friend who lived in the rectory adjacent to Coreega.

13.

Howard Florey transferred to Kyre College, a private boys' school, in 1908.

14.

Howard Florey played various sports for the school: cricket, Australian football, tennis, and track and field athletics as a sprinter and high jumper.

15.

Howard Florey served in the Senior Cadets, in which he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in August 1916.

16.

Howard Florey was head boy in his final year at school, and was ranked twelfth in the state in his final examinations.

17.

Rather than become a business man like his father, Howard Florey elected to follow in the footsteps of his sister, who studied medicine.

18.

Howard Florey entered the University of Adelaide in March 1917, his fees paid entirely by a state scholarship.

19.

Howard Florey was an editor of the Medical Students' Society's Review and theAdelaide University Magazine.

20.

Howard Florey decided to pursue medical research, a speciality that required study overseas.

21.

Howard Florey insisted that he would do neither; he would take his examinations and start at Oxford at the commencement of the Hilary term in January 1922.

22.

Howard Florey passed his examinations with second-class honours, and he was awarded his Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery degree in absentia in December 1921.

23.

The ship reached Hull on 24 January 1922, and Howard Florey took a train to London, where his sister Anne met him at Kings Cross Station.

24.

Howard Florey enrolled in the honour school of physiology, which he studied under the tutelage of Sir Charles Scott Sherrington.

25.

Howard Florey became a demonstrator in the physiology department, and he applied for a fellowship in physiology at Merton College, but was passed over in favour of Gavin de Beer.

26.

Howard Florey was awarded the degrees of Bachelor of Arts in 1924.

27.

Howard Florey hoped to be able to return to the UK via Australia and marry Ethel Reed in Adelaide, but in November 1925 he accepted an offer of a research position at London Hospital.

28.

Howard Florey managed to negotiate a delay, but only until May 1926.

29.

Howard Florey disliked the long daily commute from Chobham that put his experimental work at the mercy of the railway timetable.

30.

Howard Florey wrote up the results of the research he had done in New York on lacteals and lymphatic capillaries, which was published in the Journal of Physiology in 1927.

31.

Howard Florey then embarked on writing a thesis for a fellowship at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he became an unofficial fellow in 1926.

32.

Howard Florey continued his work on the secretion of mucus.

33.

At Cambridge, Howard Florey had a secure appointment and fine laboratory facilities, although the salary of was only a little higher.

34.

Howard Florey had to teach, which he disliked, preferring research, but there was satisfaction in that new tripos course was of largely design by himself and Alan Nigel Drury.

35.

Howard Florey arranged for Kent to be permanently assigned as his assistant, and Kent would remain in the role for the next forty years.

36.

Howard Florey collaborated with biochemist Marjory Stephenson on his lysozyme project but she did not have enough time to spare for a researcher in another department, and their results were not published.

37.

Howard Florey yearned to have an interdisciplinary team and funds for work other than his own.

38.

Howard Florey took Kent with him anyway, eventually securing 50 shillings a week for him from the Medical Research Council.

39.

Howard Florey researched the structure and function of the lymphatics with Pullinger, and continued his studies of contraception with Harry Carleton that had begun at London Hospital.

40.

Howard Florey's son Charles du Ve was born in Sheffield on 11 September 1934, but for a time Howard Florey's relationship with Ethel had deteriorated to the point where they were communicating in writing and contemplating a legal separation.

41.

The electoral board met on 22 January 1935, and Howard Florey was appointed Professor of Pathology and Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford, which controlled the chair, effective 1 May 1935.

42.

Howard Florey retained Jean Orr-Ewing and Margaret Campbell-Renton, who had been working with Dreyer, and brought Kent with him.

43.

Howard Florey hired Margaret Jennings as a gastroenterologist in October 1936, and she worked with him on his studies of mucus secretion.

44.

Howard Florey became Florey's mistress in 1940; their affair was a poorly-kept secret.

45.

Howard Florey appointed P J Smart as the office administrator, and she remained in the role until she retired in 1976.

46.

Howard Florey attracted Rhodes Scholars like Australian Brian Magraith and Americans Robert H Ebert and Leslie Epstein to the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology; other doctoral students included Peter Medawar, Gordon Sanders and Jean Taylor.

47.

Arthur Duncan Gardner headed the Medical Research Council's Standards Laboratory, which was located on the premises, and Gardner expected that his unit would have to move out, but Howard Florey moved to keep him, as he needed a good bacteriologist.

48.

Howard Florey arranged for Gardner to become head his bacteriological section, with the title of reader of bacteriology in 1936.

49.

Howard Florey wanted a biochemist on his staff, but securing one proved difficult.

50.

Howard Florey tried to obtain Hugh Macdonald Sinclair, but Sinclair declined the offer.

51.

Heatley was happy to come, and Howard Florey was able to arrange for the Medical research Council to fund the position.

52.

In 1936, Howard Florey received a letter from Hilda stating that their mother Bertha had terminal cancer, so he arranged to travel to Australia with Ethel, Paquita and Charles during the summer break.

53.

However, the team members, including Howard Florey, all worked on multiple projects at the same time.

54.

Howard Florey could be strict with his own collaborators, but gave considerable latitude to those working on other aspects of a project.

55.

Howard Florey did not hold team meetings, although he encouraged team members to discuss issues with himself and each other, and he dropped by each laboratory nearly every day to view progress and provide suggestions.

56.

Howard Florey developed a detailed project plan and deployed eight graduate researchers on it, including Sanders, Medawar and Taylor.

57.

Howard Florey performed delicate surgery on rabbits to examine the effects of lymphocyte deprivation.

58.

Howard Florey then turned to the Rockefeller Foundation for assistance, and was provided with US$1,250.

59.

Chain and Howard Florey decided to create a large research project on antibacterial substances produced by micro-organisms that could attract long-term funding.

60.

On 25 May 1940, Howard Florey injected eight mice with a virulent strain of streptococcus, and then four of them with penicillin.

61.

Howard Florey reminded his staff that promising as their results were, a man weighed 3,000 times as much as a mouse.

62.

Howard Florey expected that penicillin would be hailed as a breakthrough, but he was disappointed; his results aroused little interest.

63.

Howard Florey would spend the next two years attempting to drum up interest in what he believed to be the most important medical discovery of the century.

64.

Howard Florey was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in March 1941, but his work with penicillin played little part.

65.

In New Haven Howard Florey met Fulton and was reunited with the children.

66.

Howard Florey returned to Oxford in September without undertakings to produce the kilogram quantities of penicillin required for clinical trials, but the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 brought the United States into the war and infused a new urgency into penicillin production.

67.

Howard Florey's motivation was not potential profits, but the danger of it being patented elsewhere.

68.

Howard Florey took up the issue with Mellanby and Sir Henry Dale, but they were adamantly opposed, as they considered the notion of researchers profiting from their work as unethical.

69.

Ethel was placed in charge, but while Howard Florey was a consulting pathologist at Oxford hospitals and therefore entitled to use their wards and services, Ethel, to his annoyance, was accredited merely as his assistant.

70.

Howard Florey was appalled; this could only create a public demand when all available supplies were needed for the clinical trials.

71.

Ethel and Howard Florey published the results of clinical trials of 187 cases of treatment with penicillin in The Lancet on 27 March 1943.

72.

Howard Florey was asked to go to North Africa, where the North African campaign was ongoing.

73.

Howard Florey resisted well-intention efforts by the War Office to grant him military rank.

74.

Howard Florey gave lectures on penicillin, and his report contained recommendations for training of medical officers in its use.

75.

Howard Florey considered that the source of infection in many cases was from the hospital rather than the battlefield, and advocated changes to the way that patients were treated to take advantage of the properties of penicillin.

76.

Howard Florey argued that wounds should be cleaned and sealed up promptly.

77.

Howard Florey's recommendations were acted upon; the War Office established a training course for pathologists and clinicians at the Royal Herbert Hospital, which made use of film that Howard Florey shot in North Africa.

78.

Howard Florey agreed, but did not reach Australia until August 1944.

79.

Howard Florey met with Blamey; the two men got along well and chatted for several hours.

80.

Howard Florey discovered that penicillin production was already underway in Australia at the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories in Melbourne.

81.

Howard Florey was full of praise for their achievement, but disturbed that they had turned to the Americans for advice instead of him.

82.

Howard Florey returned to the UK in October 1944, collecting the children from Fulton while en route.

83.

However, Howard Florey said that the project was originally driven by scientific interests, and that the medicinal discovery was a bonus.

84.

Howard Florey was created a Knight Bachelor on 18 July 1944, and he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1945 with Ernst Boris Chain and Alexander Fleming,.

85.

Howard Florey insisted that the development of penicillin was a team effort and that he received more credit than he deserved, but the team itself was his creation.

86.

Howard Florey edited Lectures on General Pathology, which was published in 1954.

87.

Howard Florey saw an intellectually challenging line of research, and told them to continue.

88.

Howard Florey received 0.5 per cent share in the last two years of his life.

89.

On 7 April 1945, Howard Florey mailed a 19-page proposal for a medical research institute to Sir David Rivett, who chaired a committee exploring the proposal.

90.

Howard Florey envisaged a funding body in Australia similar to the Medical Research Council in the UK.

91.

Howard Florey never moved to Canberra, but he did accept the position of acting director of the John Curtin School of Medical Research for a five-year term commencing in May 1948 in order to establish it.

92.

Brian Lewis had been appointed university architect, but Howard Florey hired Stephen Welsh, the professor of architecture at Sheffield University.

93.

People were important, and Howard Florey had a fairly free hand hiring his professors.

94.

Howard Florey recruited Hugh Ennor as his professor of biochemistry, Adrien Albert as professor of medical chemistry, and Frank Fenner as professor of microbiology.

95.

Howard Florey visited Canberra in March 1953, but he made it clear that he did not wish to continue as acting director of the John Curtin School of Medical Research, nor take up the position of director, although he reluctantly agreed to continue as an advisor.

96.

Howard Florey was pessimistic about the project, writing home to Jennings that "it will be a miracle if this place can be given a real university atmosphere".

97.

In November 1953, Howard Florey was informed that works would proceed as planned.

98.

On 27 March 1958, Howard Florey ceremoniously opened the John Curtin School of Medical Research and received an honorary Doctor of Science degree along with Sir Norman Gregg.

99.

Howard Florey was chancellor from 1965 until his death in 1968.

100.

The Royal Society was governed by a council of twenty-one fellows, and Howard Florey served on the council from 1942 to 1943, and again from 1951 to 1953, when he was vice president.

101.

Howard Florey received the Royal Society's Royal Medal in 1951 and its Copley Medal in 1957, By custom, the president of the Royal Society served for five years, and alternated between the mathematical and physical sciences, and the biological sciences, so Florey was eligible in 1960.

102.

Howard Florey became the President of the Royal Society on 30 November 1960.

103.

In December 1960, Howard Florey was informed that plans to build new accommodation for the Foreign Office at Carlton House Terrace had fallen though and that the Crown Estate Commissioners had suggested that the premises might be suitable for the headquarters of cultural bodies.

104.

Howard Florey inspected the property and lodged a formal application to occupy four houses on the site, numbers 6 to 9.

105.

Howard Florey raised the money required to realise Sir William Holford's vision for the interiors.

106.

Howard Florey pursued a more progressive and internationalist outlook for the Royal Society.

107.

Howard Florey hosted Yuri Gagarin at a luncheon at Burlington House, and led Royal Society visits to Russia in 1965 and 1967.

108.

Howard Florey saw that Britain's future lay in being part of the European Economic Community, and he established ties with the European Organization for Nuclear Research, the European Molecular Biology Organization and the European Space Research Organization.

109.

Howard Florey had to vacate the university house he had occupied since 1935, which was demolished, with a new school erected on the site.

110.

Howard Florey brought a parcel of land in Marston, Oxford, and built a house on it.

111.

Howard Florey was succeeded by Henry Harris, a fellow Australian scientist who had been invited to study at the Sir William Dunn School by Florey in 1952 on an ANU scholarship.

112.

Howard Florey was the first provost of Queen's College with no prior association with the college as an undergraduate, graduate researcher or fellow, and the first scientist.

113.

Howard Florey had a lift installed to make it easier for Ethel and himself to reach the upstairs bedrooms.

114.

Howard Florey did not live to see the first studentship awarded in 1969, and without him additional funding was not forthcoming and the money was exhausted by 1980.

115.

Howard Florey died the day that construction work was scheduled to begin.

116.

Howard Florey was awarded many honorary degrees from British and foreign universities, including University of Sao Paulo in Brazil.

117.

Howard Florey won the Gold Medal of the Royal Society of Medicine in 1947.

118.

Howard Florey became a commander of the French Legion of Honour in 1946 and was awarded the American Medal for Merit in 1948 and the James Smithson Medal in 1965.

119.

Howard Florey was elected to both the United States National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society in 1963.

120.

Howard Florey was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences the following year.

121.

Howard Florey became an honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1961 and a Foreign Associate of the American National Academy of Sciences in 1963.

122.

On 4 February 1965, Howard Florey was created a life peer and became Baron Howard Florey, of Adelaide in the State of South Australia and Commonwealth of Australia and of Marston in the City of Oxford.

123.

Howard Florey had hypertension and respiratory and cardical problems, and walked with a stick.

124.

Howard Florey travelled to Australia one more time in 1965 to give lectures on penicillin, but collapsed in Canberra and was hospitalised in Sydney.

125.

Howard Florey refused to pay for this; if she collapsed in the United States the cost of medical care would be astronomical.

126.

Howard Florey published his last scientific paper, co-written with Jennings, in 1967.

127.

Howard Florey had written or co-written over two hundred papers.

128.

Howard Florey died at his home at the provost's lodging, of a congestive heart failure on 21 February 1968.

129.

Howard Florey's portrait appeared on the Australian fifty-dollar note for 22 years between 1973 and 1995.