Florey and the Penicillin Production Line

Just like Fleming, Florey s pathway to the penicillins began with an investigation of lysozyme. Howard Florey was born in September 1898 in Adelaide, Australia, the son of an English immigrant who had made a fortune in shoe manufacture. After a very successful school career, he entered Adelaide Medical School in 1916 and, upon graduating, proceeded to study at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. He appears to have enjoyed the Oxbridge life and two years later, in 1924, took up a research fellowship in the Department of 

Pathology in Cambridge. Here, he made several useful contributions in research on inflammation, gastric function and secretion of mucus this latter area of research led him on to a major study of lysozyme structure and function that lasted until 1938. From Cambridge, Florey moved to the University of Sheffield as Professor of Pathology in 1932, but this proved to be a brief stay since he was offered the Chair of Pathology at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology in Oxford three years later. This was to become the focus of penicillin research some four years later. 

The significance of these results was not lost on Florey and his collaborators and they were quick to publish their results in the Lancet (August 24, 1940, vol. 2, 226) under the title Penicillin as a Chemotherapeutic Agent . In this paper, they stated  

The results are clear-cut and show that penicillin is active in vivo against three of the organisms (previously) inhibited in vitro. It would seem a reasonable hope that all organisms inhibited in high dilution in vitro will also be found to be dealt with in vivo. 

The few tens of milligrams that had been used in these animal tests were but a fraction of what would be required for a clinical trial, and the team now 

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