Florey, the man who made penicillin

by Lennard Bickel

When Howard Walter Florey took up his Rhodes scholarship at Oxford in 1922, medical practice had not radically altered in two hundred years. Doctors still had no counter to such fearsome diseases as syphilis and meningitis, no answer to pneumonia, septicaemia, diphtheria, or child-bed fever. Yet within two decades of arriving in England from his native Australia, Florey had developed penicillin, which was virtually to wipe out these killer diseases. Alexander Fleming, of course, is known world-wide as the discoverer of penicillin. What is not nearly so widely known is that Florey pursued his own research into antibacterial agents, and it was he who took up penicillin after Fleming had discarded it, and developed the drug for everyday use. "Rise Up to Life" follows Florey’s career from his university days in Adelaide, through the period of his greatest research projects at Oxford, Cambridge and Sheffield which culminated in his success with penicillin, to the final years of his life when he was the first Australian to be elected President of the Royal Society. But this biography goes beyond exploring with insight and sympathy the life of a great scientist to give the reader a vivid and dramatic picture of the scientific processes that led up to a new discovery and a new era in medicine.

Genres: Biography, Science

314 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1973

Reviews

[Steven · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was an excellent biography of a very interesting life. It was enthralling to read about the struggle to develop antibiotics, penicillin in particular. The back drop of WWII and the demands it brought for penicillin made it all the more challenging, secretive and time critical.
A great read about a great Australian.