Florey, Howard Walter

Florey, Howard Walter (Baron Florey of Adelaide), 1898–1968, British pathologist, b. Australia. He was educated at Adelaide Univ. and at Cambridge and Oxford and returned to Oxford as professor of pathology in 1935. Florey shared the 1945 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Sir Alexander Fleming and Ernst B. Chain for work on penicillin. In 1939, under a Rockefeller grant, Florey and his associates began work on penicillin and proved its effectiveness against many harmful bacteria.

Bibliography

See biography by L. Bickel (1973).

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Florey, Howard Walter 

Born Sept. 24, 1898, in Adelaide, Australia; died Feb. 21, 1968, in Oxford. British pathologist. Fellow of the Royal Society of London from 1941 and its president from 1960 to 1965.

Florey graduated from the University of Adelaide in 1921 and studied at Oxford University from 1921 to 1924. In 1925 and 1926 he worked in laboratories in the United States. In 1927 he taught at Cambridge University. In 1931 he became a professor of pathology at the University of Sheffield, and from 1935 to 1962 he was a professor in the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology at Oxford. From 1962 to 1968 he was provost of Queen’s College at Oxford.

Florey’s main works dealt with the pathology of the capillary circulation, inflammatory processes, lymphocyte functions, lysozyme, and antibiotics of microbial origin. Florey directed work on the purification of penicillin, jointly with E. Chain, and in 1940 he was the first to use penicillin successfully in the treatment of animals and man.

Florey was a foreign member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1966) and a member of many other organizations, including the National Academy of Sciences of the United States. In 1945 he shared a Nobel Prize with A. Fleming and E. Chain.

WORKS

General Pathology, 3rd ed. London, 1962.