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  1. Home
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  3. February
  4. 21
  5. Howard Florey

Deaths on February 21

Howard Florey
1968Feb, 21

Howard Florey

Howard Florey, Australian pathologist and pharmacologist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1898)
Howard Walter Florey, Baron Florey (24 September 1898 – 21 February 1968) was an Australian pharmacologist and pathologist who shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1945 with Sir Ernst Chain and Sir Alexander Fleming for his role in the development of penicillin.

Although Fleming received most of the credit for the discovery of penicillin, it was Florey who carried out the first clinical trials of penicillin in 1941 at the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford on the first patient, a police constable from Oxford. The patient started to recover, but subsequently died because Florey was unable, at that time, to make enough penicillin. It was Florey and Chain who actually made a useful and effective drug out of penicillin, after the task had been abandoned as too difficult.

Florey's discoveries, along with the discoveries of Fleming and Ernst Chain, are estimated to have saved over 200 million lives, and he is consequently regarded by the Australian scientific and medical community as one of its greatest figures. Sir Robert Menzies, Australia's longest-serving Prime Minister, said, "In terms of world well-being, Florey was the most important man ever born in Australia."

References

  • Howard Florey
  • Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Choose Another Date

Events on 1968

  • 30Jan

    Tet Offensive

    Vietnam War: Tet Offensive launch by forces of the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army against South Vietnam, the United States, and their allies.
  • 31Jan

    Tet Offensive

    Vietnam War: Viet Cong guerrillas attack the United States embassy in Saigon, and other attacks, in the early morning hours, later grouped together as the Tet Offensive.
  • 29Apr

    Counterculture of the 1960s

    The controversial musical Hair, a product of the hippie counter-culture and sexual revolution of the 1960s, opens at the Biltmore Theatre on Broadway, with some of its songs becoming anthems of the anti-Vietnam War movement.
  • 14Oct

    U.S. Marine Corps

    Vietnam War: The United States Department of Defense announces that the U.S. Army and U.S. Marine Corps will send about 24,000 soldiers and Marines back to Vietnam for involuntary second tours of duty in the combat zone there.
  • 20Oct

    Jacqueline Kennedy

    Former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy marries Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis.

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