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Notes Rec. R. Soc. Lond. 53 (2), 243–252 (1999)
© 1999 The Royal Society
HOWARD FLOREY AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF PENICILLIN
by
HENRY HARRIS
Sir William Dunn School of Pathology, University of Oxford,
South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3RE, UK
SUMMARY
This article is an exact transcript of the Florey Centenary Lecture given at the Sir
William Dunn School of Pathology, University of Oxford, to mark the one-hundredth
anniversary of the birth of Lord Florey, who led the group that introduced penicillin
into clinical medicine. The Lecture was delivered on 29 September 1998.
Howard Florey was the head of the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology for 27 years
and in each of those years he gave his lectures to undergraduates in this lecture
theatre. He gave his last lecture here in 1961, the year before he retired from the
Professorship of Pathology to become the Provost of The Queen’s College. When he
had finished his lecture he simply turned on his heel and walked out. The only
comment he permitted himself on that occasion was to say ‘That’s that’. We remember
him today for the contribution he made to the development of penicillin. September
24 was the 100th anniversary of his birth.
I was in two minds, when I decided to give this lecture, whether it should include
a brief account of the development of penicillin. Few advances in the history of 20thcentury medicine have attracted so much attention. There are hagiographic lives of
three of the principal figures involved; numerous commentaries on the work, most of
them written to emphasize the importance of the contribution that had been made in
Oxford or in St Mary’s Hospital London; some personal recollections that are, to say
the least, contentious. And I wondered whether I, who was not present at the time,
could possibly have anything to add to this mountain of emotional literature. My mind
was made up by the receipt, a few months ago, of yet another assessment of Florey
written for wide distribution. It contained the following passage:
With true Australian determination and a strong will to win, Howard Florey attacked the task
in hand, a task that would span three decades and two world wars. It was this spirit that pushed
him onwards, hurdling the obstacles, both scientific and bureaucratic, that barred his path to
success.
Howard Florey died in 1968, after a lifetime dedicated to the study of antibiotics. His one
life was, and still is, responsible for the saving of countless others.
With the exception of the year of Florey’s death, essentially every statement in that
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panegyric is incorrect. Romantic fiction of that sort merely dehumanizes the individual
and in the end belittles him. Florey would have hated it. I don’t know whether there
is something special about Australian determination that distinguishes it from the
determination of other people, although I must admit that more than one of the
numerous young Australians who passed through this laboratory in Florey’s time and
in mine were certainly determined enough. How the task in hand could span three
decades and two world wars is difficult to understand. Florey was at the threshold of
his undergraduate medical course in Adelaide when the First World War broke out and
did not take up the study of penicillin until the outbreak of the Second World War. His
lifetime was not dedicated to the study of antibiotics. Penicillin was a parenthesis in
his experimental career, most of which was devoted to other subjects altogether. His
own contribution to the study of antibiotics was largely exhausted by 1946, or
thereabouts, when he and his colleagues finished writing their massive two-volume
work on the subject. Antibiotics thus occupied Florey for a mere seven or eight years
in an active experimental life of some 40. It seems to me that if such misconceptions
are still given general currency in 1998, an account of the development of penicillin
that at least aspires to be factual might not come amiss on this occasion.
Penicillin was discovered by Alexander Fleming at St Mary’s Hospital in 1928. The
crucial observation was made on a bacterial culture plate that, by chance, had been
left to stand on his bench for some days. Fleming noticed that surrounding a colony
of mould that had contaminated the plate there was a zone in which bacterial growth
was inhibited. The conditions required to reproduce this appearance appear to be very
exacting but, be that as it may, it was an appearance that induced Fleming to examine
the antibacterial principle in the mould culture fluid. He found it to be active against
some pathogenic bacteria, but not against others. He named it penicillin because the
mould that produced it was called Penicillium notatum. There is a tale that claims the
Penicillium notatum spore had flown into his laboratory through a window that faced
on to Praed Street. In fact, this species of Penicillium was being studied elsewhere in
the department at that time, and it is probable that its corridors were laden with a more
than adequate supply of spores. It has been argued that Fleming never entertained the
idea that penicillin might be used as a chemotherapeutic agent, but this seems unlikely,
for he tested the toxicity of the antibacterial culture fluid not only against the defensive
white cells of the blood but also by injection into a rabbit. It is difficult to see why he
should have bothered to inject this substance into an animal if he had never thought
of the possibility that it might be used as a systemic chemotherapeutic agent. He found
that the antibacterial principle, in the concentration used, was not toxic either to the
white cells or the rabbit. An attempt to purify penicillin was made by Craddock and
Ridley, two young men in Fleming’s department, and although their purification
procedures yielded important information about some of the properties of penicillin,
including the fact that it was not a protein, the extract that they finally produced was
found, in their hands, to be highly unstable. It is probable that it was this apparent
instability of penicillin that discouraged further work on the substance, although the
literature does contain a few anecdotes describing its effectiveness when administered
by topical application to superficial or highly localized infections.
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Fleming’s penicillin paper was
published in 1929 in the British Journal
of Experimental Pathology. Florey must
have known about it, for he was at the
time one of the editors of that journal,
but like everyone else he did nothing
about it. Florey was elected to the Chair
of Pathology in Oxford in 1935. He had,
prior to this date, worked on a number of
different subjects, but not on what is
known as antibiosis, the production by
one micro-organism of a substance that
is toxic to others. He was especially
interested in blood vessels, the
circulation of lymph, the inflammatory
response and, above all, the secretion of
mucus. When he was elected to the
Royal Society in 1941 it was not for his
contribution to the development of
penicillin but for his work on the
circulation of lymph, the secretion of
mucus and the function of certain glands
Figure 1. Sir Howard Florey, F.R.S.
in the intestine. The subject of his
Croonian Lecture, given to the Royal
Society in 1954, was not penicillin but mucus; and in his book, Lectures on general
pathology, which appeared in the same year, he wrote, in addition to sections dealing
with inflammation, a whole chapter devoted to mucus.
His abiding interest in mucus had its origin in an episode that occurred during his
early days as a young lecturer in Cambridge. He was at one point afflicted with
recurrent stomach pains, which were misdiagnosed as manifestations of achlorhydria,
a condition in which the acid normally secreted by the mucus membrane of the
stomach is absent. He was given dilute hydrochloric acid to be taken by mouth, but,
in his own words, ‘the only thing that did was rot my teeth’. Henceforth, it was
mucus secretion in the gut that, for decades, remained the recurrent theme of his work.
Although he often protested that his research did not have a therapeutic or humanitarian
goal, but was undertaken out of curiosity and interest, the fact remains that most of
his experimental investigations were stimulated by clinical conditions with which he,
or other members of his family, were, at one time or another, afflicted. However, he
had little time for clinical research as it was then practised. He took the view that it
was inordinately expensive and that its results were meagre. He resented the fact that
it deflected so much of the available research funding away from the basic
experimental work of which he was a staunch protagonist. His antipathy to the clinical
world also had very early roots. Even as an undergraduate in Adelaide, he was
unenthusiastic about the clinical part of the medical course, and he disliked the airs
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that some of the prominent clinicians gave themselves. He certainly did not share the
estimate they themselves had of their own importance. If, in later years, one of his
D.Phil. students got into difficulties, he would often threaten, only half in jest, that he
might have to ‘send him back to the clinic’.
Prior to penicillin, Florey had no reputation as a microbiologist but was known to
be a very effective physiologist, who applied physiological methods to pathological
processes. His attachment to physiology was lifelong. Young men who began their
scientific careers under his direction were once obliged first to read the undergraduate
Final Honour School of Animal Physiology at Oxford, as he himself had done a
generation earlier.
He was a competent animal surgeon and did not seem hampered by the Dupuytren
contracture that he had. This is a common deformity of the hand in which the ring and
little fingers are curled up and cannot be fully extended. I had not noticed this before
but, one day, for some reason, Dupuytren came into the conversation and Florey held
out his hand to show me that he himself had this lesion. I cannot now be certain which
hand it was; it is, of course, possible that both hands were affected.
How then, did he come to be deflected from his long-standing experimental
interests to take up the investigation of penicillin? There is an element of uncertainty
here, and the matter has long been a bone of contention between different factions;
but it is possible, nonetheless, to piece together an explanation that is at least plausible.
Florey had for many years been convinced that some serious chemistry had to be
introduced into the study of pathology. In Adelaide, he had originally wanted to be a
chemist, but was dissuaded by advice given him that there were then very few jobs
for chemists in Australia; and he had therefore turned to medicine. The Chair of
Pathology at Oxford offered him the opportunity to add chemistry to the range of
techniques at his disposal. On the recommendation of Gowland Hopkins, the eminent
professor of biochemistry at Cambridge, Florey offered a position at the Sir William
Dunn School to Ernst Boris Chain. Chain, a Jewish refugee from Hitler’s Germany,
and facing an uncertain future, accepted with alacrity. One of the problems taken up
by Chain in his new position at Oxford was an investigation of the mode of action of
lysozyme. This was a substance found in tears, nasal secretions and other body fluids,
which had antibacterial activity against a limited range of bacteria. It had also been
discovered by Fleming, and Florey’s interest in it was prompted by the fact that it was
to be found in mucus. Chain, together with Edward Duthie, showed that lysozyme was
an enzyme that split an essential polysaccharide in the bacterial cell wall; they
elucidated the precise chemistry of the reaction. Chain regarded the work on lysozyme
as essentially complete and, with Florey’s concurrence, undertook a review of other
antibacterial substances that might be explored. Eventually this review yielded a
short-list of three candidates for further investigation: the products of Bacillus subtilis,
Bacillus pyocyaneus and penicillin. We will, of course, never know the content of
unrecorded conversations between Florey and Chain, but what evidence there is
suggests that it was Chain who proposed penicillin and Florey, to use his own words,
‘went along with it’. In later accounts, Chain claimed that it was the supposed
instability of penicillin that attracted him, and Florey appears to have been persuaded
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by the fact that penicillin was the only one of the substances considered that was active
against staphylococci, a source of serious purulent infection in man.
In any event, it was Chain who initiated the work on penicillin in the Dunn School.
Florey at the time was still actively engaged in experiments on other subjects. The first
paper on penicillin from the Dunn School appeared on 24 August 1940, but in July
of that same year Florey and his collaborators submitted for publication two papers
on lymphocytes, one on the effects of the removal of lymphoid tissue from the body
and one on the mechanism of capillary contraction. The penicillin mould had already
been brought into the department by A.D. Gardner, the Reader in Bacteriology and
later Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford, not, of course, as a potential
chemotherapeutic compound, but as a diagnostic reagent that helped to identify
certain bacteria in culture. This was the principal application of penicillin in the
decade that had elapsed since Fleming discovered it.
Chain soon produced a number of crude, probably alcoholic, extracts of the culture
fluid in which the mould had been grown and sought to test their toxicity. He did not
himself possess a Home Office licence for experiments with animals and took one of
the extracts to John Barnes, an admirable man who was then working in the department
and who later became the Director of the Medical Research Council’s Toxicology Unit.
Barnes injected the extract into two mice and found that it was entirely without
perceptible toxicity. Chain was greatly excited by this result, for reasons which, to us
now, are not at all clear, for the experiment seemed to be little more than a confirmation
of the work of Fleming. When Chain reported the result to Florey, it is said that Florey
was annoyed that Chain had taken the extract to Barnes for animal testing and not to
himself. Nonetheless, Chain seems to have succeeded in transmitting some of his
excitement to Florey, for it was at this point that Florey turned away from his own
experimental interests and gave his full attention to penicillin. With Florey’s energetic
support, what had started as a speculative experiment was now transformed into a
research programme.
There was no chance that Chain could have done what Florey achieved in the next
couple of years. To begin with, Florey was the head of the department and was in a
position to direct the resources of the Dunn School to the penicillin project. But, even
more important than this, he was a very practical man and saw at once that a successful
outcome would be achieved only by the collaboration of several hands. He was a good
manager of men and quickly assembled the group of disparate talents that was
necessary. He remained at all times their undisputed leader. Moreover, one quality that
he had in abundance was drive, and that was going to be necessary on more than one
occasion. But he did not himself make the key experimental contributions that were
required to produce a usable preparation of penicillin. These were made by Norman
Heatley, who is much too modest to admit it.
Heatley, who was already a member of the department because his plans to work
with Linderstrøm-Lang in Denmark were cut short by the war, was asked by Florey
to join the penicillin project and agreed, provided that he was expected to report not
to Chain, but directly to Florey. In the face of Chain’s scepticism, Heatley devised the
solvent-to-water transfer cycle that permitted an impure but stable penicillin to be
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prepared from the mould culture fluid. This procedure formed the basis of an early
counter-current distribution apparatus that Heatley himself built. He also devised the
cylinder plate diffusion technique that provided a much easier, reliable and sensitive
assay for penicillin and was later adopted as the standard assay for antibiotic activity.
The mould was initially grown in flasks, bottles, trays, dishes and even 16 oldfashioned bedpans with lid and spout borrowed from the Radcliffe Infirmary. Heatley
designed and managed to obtain, under very difficult wartime conditions, 400
rectangular ceramic vessels that were stackable and in which the medium could be
changed. And finally, it was he who monitored the first experiment in which the
protective effect of penicillin was assayed in mice infected with streptococci. The result
was dramatically successful, and when Florey, returning to the laboratory with Chain
after a dinner together at Lincoln College, saw the preliminary results, he described
them as a miracle. And so they were.
Much more extensive animal protection tests, including some with other pathogenic
organisms, were then carried out by Florey who, in addition studied the pharmacology
of the penicillin extracts and, with Mrs Margaret Jennings, assayed their toxicity
against the white cells of the blood. After no more than a few weeks of preparative
work, enough stable penicillin was accumulated to permit trials of the drug to be made
on patients with normally fatal bacterial infections. These trials were carried out in
the Radcliffe Infirmary by Charles Fletcher, working under Florey’s direction. The
results, despite some initial setbacks, which were overcome by Florey’s doggedness,
were spectacular and established beyond doubt the efficacy of penicillin as a
therapeutic agent. This work may be regarded as the true dawn of the age of antibiotics.
In order to strengthen the chemical side of the work, Florey attracted Edward
Abraham to the Dunn School. Abraham, who had recently completed his doctorate
in the Department of Organic Chemistry at Oxford (the Dyson Perrins Laboratory) set
about the difficult task of purifying penicillin and determining its structure. He was
eventually completely successful in both these aims and was the first to propose the
correct chemical structure for penicillin. Abraham’s structure, which involved the novel
β-lactam ring, was at once accepted by Chain, but not by Robert Robinson, Head of
the Dyson Perrins Laboratory, or by J.W. Cornforth, another distinguished Australian
who was then also working in the Dyson Perrins; they suggested an alternative
structure. The matter was settled by Dorothy Hodgkin (Crowfoot at the time), who
examined crystals provided by Abraham and confirmed by crystallographic methods
the presence of the β-lactam ring.
Florey was unable to induce any of the British pharmaceutical companies to take
up the large-scale production of penicillin. Partly this was due to their then
characteristic conservatism, and partly due to the circumstances of the war. Florey did
not, however, give up, but went to America to see whether the project could be
undertaken there. I do not propose to recount the saga of his attempts to get the
American pharmaceutical industry interested, except to say that, once again, they are
a testimonial to his perseverance. Through the influence of an old friend, A.N.
Richards, who by then had become the Chairman of the Medical Research Committee
of the United States Office of Scientific Research and Development, Florey did
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eventually succeed; and, with direct experimental help from Heatley, the first supply
of penicillin on a large scale issued from the USA. To sum it all up: without Fleming,
no Chain or Florey; without Chain, no Florey; without Florey, no Heatley; without
Heatley, no penicillin.
For two or three years after the war Florey fished without success for other
antibiotics, but by 1950 he had reverted to his former interests and added two new ones.
The first of these was electron microscopy, which he applied mainly to the study of
inflammation and secretion. Electron microscopy remained an interest of his even after
his retirement from the Dunn School. The second was atherosclerosis, which he now
began to investigate with his usual vigour, assembling another small team in which John
French and Donald Robinson were the principal contributors. The sudden interest in
atherosclerosis was, I suspect, not unconnected with his own health for, almost 20 years
before his death, he had suffered his first attack of angina. Before that he had been
almost a chain smoker, but abandoned cigarettes altogether thereafter. I guessed there
was something wrong because of an obvious change in his habits. In my time he
usually came into the laboratory at about 10 o’clock in the morning and trudged
heavily up the main staircase. One day, I noticed with surprise that he took the lift up,
and that soon became his normal mode of upward transport in the laboratory.
I do not think that any account of the later Florey would be coherent if his own
pathology were ignored. Florey was very secretive about this, partly because he was
reticent about all personal matters, but partly also because he thought that if it was
widely known that he had a life-threatening cardiac condition, he would not be
offered the opportunity to do the things that he still wanted to do. He was also very
secretive about his home life. Although everyone in the laboratory knew that it was
pretty bleak and could hardly fail to observe some of the obvious consequences of this,
Florey was careful to maintain the outward forms of conventional marital
respectability, and did so to the end of his days. His wife Ethel, who had contributed
to the clinical studies on penicillin, died in 1966 and, the following summer, less than
a year before his own death, he married Margaret Jennings.
Like everyone else, Florey changed with time, but in his case the changes were
almost kaleidoscopic. I did not, of course, know the young Florey, but he was by all
accounts an aggressive tennis player (which may have contributed to his being
awarded a Rhodes scholarship), a tireless experimenter, very ambitious, plain-spoken,
to put it mildly, hot-tempered and instantly recognizable as an Australian. Some idea
of the style of the man at that time may be gathered from a comment made elsewhere
in South Parks Road, in which Florey and his Australian collaborators in the Dunn
School were referred to as ‘Australian bandits’. His speech remained unmistakably
Australian to the end, although with time the accent was much diluted. He apparently
also shared some of the less likeable characteristics of the parochial and xenophobic
White Australia of his youth: as a young man he disliked Jews, Italians and, to quote
him ‘didn’t much care for black men’ either. All this evaporated with time, and I
detected no trace of racial or national prejudice in the later Florey.
Much has been made of Florey’s Australianism, but this, like the man himself, was
a very complex phenomenon. When, at a much later date, after his plans to return to
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Canberra had foundered, I asked him whether he had deep regrets about this and
whether his nostalgia for Australia, like mine, was still strong. He did not answer me
directly but simply said ‘My father was an Englishman, Harris. If you look out on the
right-hand side as the train from London moves into Oxford, you will see an old
building that still bears a faded sign that proclaims it is “Flory’s Commercial Hotel”.’
Flor(e)y is not an uncommon name in Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire, and Howard
Florey was not indifferent to his English heritage. On another occasion he referred to
himself as a ‘Commonwealth man’, by which he meant not only that he was the
product of the old Commonwealth that looked to England as the Mother Country, but
also that the British Commonwealth of Nations was a political idea that had his
support.
He had one characteristic that was very un-Australian. He was a stickler for the use
of surnames in addressing or talking about people. This was so even to colleagues with
whom he had been associated for more than half a century: it was always Heatley,
never Norman; always Abraham, not Ted. This was, of course, the common practice
in England, especially among ex-public schoolboys, when Florey arrived here, but it
was never a feature of adult personal relations in Australia. I can recall only one
occasion on which I heard him addressed as Howard. It was during the course of an
evening on which I had Florey and Peter Medawar together at my home. Medawar,
after dinner, addressed Florey as Howard; but later that evening Florey addressed
Medawar as Medawar. To the cronies of his young days he was known as Floss. This
adherence to formal modes of address was, of course, a mechanism by which Florey
kept familiarity at bay.
When I was introduced to him in 1950, he wore severe steel-rimmed National
Health Service spectacles and presented an impenetrable wall of detached matter-offactness. When I arrived in the Dunn School at the beginning of 1952, and entered his
study, I was greeted by the remark: ‘Ah there, Harris, there you are’, and, pointing
towards one of a pair of big brown leather armchairs: ‘Take the weight off your feet’.
He wouldn’t talk about what I was going to do until I had found somewhere to live:
‘That will be your first piece of research in Oxford’. Florey was by then a very
different man from what he appears to have been in his youth. He was secure,
confident, masterful and his speech, although still very direct and close to the ground,
was not as colourful as I imagine it must once have been. He loathed ostentation or
pretentiousness of any sort, and he would never tolerate exaggeration, rhetoric or selfadvertisement (what we now call hype) in any scientific communication, verbal or
written. Deflationary comments were his stock-in-trade. Whenever he returned from
one of his numerous trips abroad and we happened to cross in the corridor he would
inevitably say something astringent like ‘Ah there, Harris. Still going backwards?’ or
‘Ah there, Harris. Made any discoveries lately?’
His prose style was no more elegant than his speech. Virtually all his later scientific
papers, articles and orations were revised and edited by Margaret Jennings before they
saw the light of day. Within certain limits, Margaret Jennings became very adept in
this kind of editorial work. Florey’s D.Phil. students, mainly Australians like myself,
were left to sink or swim. He rarely spoke to his D.Phil. students until they had
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achieved something and then his reaction was calculated to ensure that they didn’t get ideas
above their station. He disliked speculation. James Gowans, who worked in the Dunn School
for almost 15 years while it was under Florey’s direction and who later became the Secretary
of the Medical Research Council, told me recently, when we were reminiscing about
Florey, that in all those years he had never once had an imaginative scientific conversation
with him. It was a cold regime and those who survived the inclement weather were for ever
marked by it. Traces of Florey’s down-to-earth manner are recognizable in all of us.
Florey usually escaped from Oxford when the grass in the University Parks began
to shed its pollen. He had in middle age, it seems, acquired an acute sensitivity to this
and suffered at that time of the year from hay fever. When he came back to the Dunn
School in the summer, he generally wore dark glasses and was full of antihistamines.
But there were chinks in his armour. I learned by chance that Florey, on a visit to
one of his Australian colleagues in London, Roy Cameron, had actually made
laudatory remarks about my work. After that, I was perfectly happy to receive as much
in-house disparagement as he was prepared to dish out. An even more revealing
incident occurred when my wife and I came down together with what was then
known as Asian flu. In that condition it was naturally not easy to look after our
children. One morning when I answered the front door bell, I was amazed to see the
formidable Miss Winifred Poynton, Florey’s secretary, standing there obviously
embarrassed. The Professor, she explained, had asked her to come along to see if she
could be of any help. To those of his young men who became fixtures in the laboratory
Florey was very loyal and the loyalty was returned. We learnt to treat his withering
remarks as something of a joke, and we look back on them now with affection.
And then there is the late Florey who was elected President of the Royal Society in
1960, who became the Provost of the Queen’s College in 1962, and who was ennobled
in 1965, the year in which he was also invited to be the Chancellor of the Australian
National University. He was by then a jovial, almost avuncular and sometimes very
humorous sexagenarian. The barbed wit remained, but it was no longer painful and was
not intended to be. He had not expected to be President of the Royal Society and was
genuinely surprised when the invitation came. This was not only because he knew he
still had a reputation for fierceness, but also because he had for some time had little to
do with the Society or its elaborate administration. He proved, not surprisingly to those
who knew him, to be very effective. He succeeded in obtaining a grant from the
government to transfer the Society from its cramped quarters beside the Royal Academy
to a splendid new abode in Carlton House Terrace; and he obtained another to establish
a number of Royal Society Research Professorships to enable a small group of very
gifted people to devote their full time to research.
As Provost of Queen’s he was, in the end, an outstanding success. This could not
have been predicted, for the governing body of Queen’s at that time had a reputation
for fractiousness and contained some very difficult Fellows. He was, to begin with,
unhappy in the post. ‘The dons’ he once said to me, were as ‘clever as a bagful of cats’.
But eventually he ‘wore them down’, as he himself put it, and to everyone’s amazement
restored peace in the College. The governing body even asked him to stay on after he
had reached the normal age of retirement, but that was not to be. He was actually a
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very able administrator, although he was always overtly contemptuous of
administration. Shortly after I was elected to succeed him at the Dunn School, he had
me to dinner at Queen’s and as I left at the end of the evening his parting words were:
‘The job’s a cake-walk, Harris. Just don’t get bogged down in administration.’
The Order of Merit is normally conferred on the President of the Royal Society and,
in Florey’s time several of the Presidents were also made Barons. These honours
pleased Florey especially because they signalled that he, the outsider, had been
completely accepted within the English establishment. Australians then looked askance
at any one of their number who accepted a British title; perhaps they still do. When
I congratulated him on his elevation to the peerage, I asked him what he was expecting
to come his way next. ‘The grave, Harris, the grave’ he answered, and I knew exactly
what it was that prompted so gloomy a reply.
The Chancellorship of the Australian National University was for him a deeply
gratifying distinction. It was, of course, an act of atonement for the administrative
fiasco that resulted in his failure ever to return permanently to his native country. One
prerequisite of the Chancellorship that he particularly enjoyed was the regular receipt
of cases of the best Australian vintages.
Florey died during the night of 21 February 1968 of the coronary occlusion that he
knew awaited him.
In 1945 Fleming, Chain and Florey were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology
and Medicine. Chain was not elected to the Royal Society until 1949, four years after
he won his Nobel Prize, a delay that for him remained a lifelong source of resentment.
Florey had his own views about the Nobel Prize. Here is an extract from an interview
that he gave in the last year of his life.
Well, perhaps you’d like to know some things about the Nobel Prize that every body thinks
very highly of. The three of us got it together, that is to say, Chain, Fleming and me, and it
was the first prize-giving after the war, so the Swedes put on a tremendous occasion. Of
course, it’s in December, and snow about in Stockholm, and they ring the city bells while
you’re propelled through the town hall, which is one of the pride and joys of not only
Stockholm but of Europe, and there’s a very elaborate ceremony when the King performs the
essential business of handing the citation and medal to the recipients. Then there is a
tremendous dinner in which a large number of speeches are made and this was followed by
a ball with the students in this very magnificent town hall. As I say, it being the first after the
war, great enthusiasm was put into this. Well now, one is asked what feelings do you have
in getting a Nobel Prize. Well it’s very, very gratifying, very gratifying indeed, but one should
always realize that there’s a terrible lot of luck in this sort of thing. We happen to have hit
an antibiotic which worked in man. We could have worked with hundreds of others and they
would have been chemical curiosities. So this was a bit of luck. There’s no question behind
this, and, indeed, when you look critically at some of the Nobel Prizes, you realize that other
people have had luck too.
Florey was not a profound visionary, like Copernicus or Galileo or Faraday; he was not
an outstanding experimental innovator like Pasteur or Koch or Ehrlich; he was not a
towering scientific intellect like Newton or Darwin or Einstein. But he had one supreme
virtue: he knew exactly what had to be done next, and he got it done. We should all be
grateful for that.