Howard Florey

Howard Florey.
Howard Florey (1898–1968) was an Australian pharmacologist and pathologist who shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1945 with Ernst Chain and Alexander Fleming for his role in the development of the antibiotic penicillin. While Fleming received most of the credit for the drug's discovery, it was Florey and his team at the University of Oxford in England who developed techniques for growing, purifying and manufacturing it, tested it on animals and carried out the first clinical trials. Later trials in Britain, the United States and North Africa were highly successful. In addition to his work on penicillin, Florey studied other antibiotics, including lysozyme and the cephalosporins, and researched contraception. He was elected President of the Royal Society in 1960, became the provost of The Queen's College at Oxford in 1962, and served as the chancellor of the Australian National University from 1965 until his death. Florey's discoveries are estimated to have saved more than 80 million lives.