Howard Walter Florey, Baron Florey (24 September 189821 February 1968) 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. Although Fleming received most of the credit for the discovery of penicillin, it was Florey and his team at the University of Oxford who made it into a useful and effective drug, after the task had been abandoned ten years before. They developed techniques for growing, purifying and manufacturing the drug, determined its chemical structure, discovered how it worked, tested it for toxicity and efficacy on animals, and carried out the first clinical trials on people. In 1941 they used it to treat a police constable from Oxford. He started to recover, but subsequently died because Florey was unable, at that time, to make enough penicillin. Later trials in Britain, the United States and North Africa were highly successful. A graduate of the University of Adelaide, Florey studied at the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and in the United States on a fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation. In 1935 he became the director of the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology at Oxford. He assembled a multidisciplinary staff that could tackle major research projects. In addition to his work on penicillin, he researched many other subjects, most notably lysozyme, contraception and cephalosporin. He 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. He 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. In 1962 he became Provost of The Queen's College, Oxford. 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. Sir Robert Menzies, said, "In terms of world well-being, Florey was the most important man ever born in Australia." Early life and education Howard Walter Florey was born in Malvern, a southern suburb of Adelaide, South Australia, on 24 September 1898. His surname rhymes with "sorry". He