• Sir Howard Walter Florey
• Lord Howard Florey
• Baron Florey
• September 24th 1898
• Malvern, Adelaide, South Australia
• His father, Joseph Florey, was a boot manufacturer from England.
• His mother, Bertha Mary Florey, was a third generation Australian.
• He was the youngest of five children, and was the only son.
• He met Ethel Reed, a medical student at the University of Adelaide who became his wife
• Florey was educated at Kyre College Preparatory School; he continued his higher education in the Collegiate School of St Peter.
• In school, he exceeded academically and was a junior sportsman.
• Florey studied medicine from 1917 to 1921 at the University of Adelaide, where he achieved a Bachelor of Science, and a Bachelor of Medicine. …show more content…
They found that penicillin could be preserved if extracted as a salt between a pH of 5 and 8.
• In 1940, Florey conducted animal tests on staphylococcal-infected mice. The 8 treated mice survived whist the untreated mice died within 2-3 days.
• It was later discovered that penicillin worked by binding to proteins such as transpeptidase, which stops them from catalyzing the crosslinking process in bacterial peptidoglycan production. This leads to degradation of the bacterial cell wall, stopping the bacteria from spreading.
• Florey’s team is remembered for working under difficult financial circumstances to mass produce penicillin so that it would be accessible and useful to the public.

• The first human trial on Albert Alexander in 1941 was a success initially; he showed signs of recovery from staph infection within a day. However, they did not have enough penicillin to facilitate a full recovery so he had a relapse and died. Another treated girl subsequently died for the same reason. However, two patients made successful recoveries from staph infection following these deaths.
• Penicillin helped combat many bacterial infections that were previously