The Australian experimental pathologist and teacher Howard Walter Florey, Baron Florey of Adelaide (1898-1968), helped isolate penicillin and develop it as a successful nontoxic antibacterial agent for use in medical treatment.

Howard W. Florey, the son of Joseph Florey, was born on Sept. 24, 1898, at Adelaide. After attending St. Peter's Collegiate School and Adelaide University (1916-1921), where he received a degree in medicine, he entered Magdalen College, Oxford, as a Rhodes scholar in 1921 and then Cambridge University in 1924. During 1925-1926 he was Rockefeller traveling fellow in the United States. In 1926 he was appointed Freedom research fellow at Cambridge. In the same year he married Mary Ethel Reed; they had two children.

Florey became successively Huddersfield lecturer in special pathology at Cambridge University in 1927, Joseph Hunter professor of pathology at the University of Sheffield in 1931, and professor and head of the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology at Oxford University...