Howard Florey

Biography of Howard Florey, the brilliant Australian who developed penicillin, enabling a mastery of disease and death never before imagined.Howard Florey was the brilliant, ambitious and sometimes ruthless Australian who developed penicillin, the first antibiotic, enabling a mastery of disease and death never before imagined in human history.The penicillin epic traces the fascinating, often frustrated path of Florey’s drive in Britain and the United States to isolate, test and produce the ‘miracle drug’ that was to empty the infectious wards and revolutionize surgery-saving millions of lives and changing the pattern of world disease.This many-sided man was the first Australian to be President of the Royal Society and when he died in 1968, Sir Robert Menzies said ‘in terms of world well-being, Florey was the most important man ever born in Australia’.