over British firms having to pay royalties to American ones for the use of the deep submergence techniques developed in the United States to produce penicillin when penicillin was seen as a British innovation led to the establishement of the National Research Development Corporation (NRDC) in June 1948. The Oxford team patented their work on cephalosporins and assigned the patents to the NRDC. By 1978 the annual world sales of cephalosporins were worth over £600,000 () and the NRDC was reaping £100,000 () a year in royalties. Australian National University In the original design of the city of Canberra, the architect, Walter Burley Griffin had provided for a university, and had set aside land for it at the base of Black Mountain, where it would ultimately be built. On 7 April 1945, Florey mailed a 19-page proposal for a medical research institute to Sir David Rivett, who chaired a committee exploring the proposal. Florey envisaged a funding body in Australia similar to the Medical Research Council in the UK. The institute would be headed by a director, and have about one hundred staff, which he calculated would cost about £100,000 (). His estimate of the cost of the building was wide of the mark though: Florey reckoned that £240,000 () would be enough for a building for 60 researchers, but it would eventually cost almost four times as much. The Australian National University Act received royal assent on 1 August 1946. The act created the Australian National University (ANU), and gave the medical research institute the name "John Curtin School of Medical Research". H. C. "Nugget" Coombs met with Florey in Oxford in 1946. Everyone agreed that the success of the new university would depend on the quality of faculty they could attract, and he wanted four eminent scholars to lead the four research schools: Florey for medicine, Mark Oliphant for physics, Keith Hancock for history, and Raymond William Firth for Pacific studies. Each received an official invitation in April 1947, and they were invited to come to Canberra for consultation in December 1947 and January 1948. They would constitute an academic advisory committee, for which they would be paid £250 () plus £200 () expenses per annum. Since they were all located in the UK, a London office of the university was opened to provide liaison. Florey never moved to Canberra, but he did accept the position of acting