Why did Howard Florey and Ernst Chain do
serious research on penicillin in 1939 and
1940?

Florey was born in Adelaide, Australia, the youngest of five children and the only son of an English shoemaker who had immigrated to Australia hoping to save his first wife and two eldest daughters, who were suffering from tuberculosis. He established a boot and shoe factory, which prospered during much of Florey’s youth.

From an early age Florey knew that he wanted to study medicine, perhaps because an older sister was already a medical student. She teased him about wanting to become “another Pasteur” (see Louis Pasteur), thus forecasting his interest in medical research. In 1922 he graduated with degrees in science and medicine from the University of Adelaide, which at that time specialized in preparing general practitioners, not researchers. On the basis of his fine academic record and his prowess as a tennis player, he was awarded a prestigious Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford University in England.

At Oxford his hunger for research was fed at the Honours Physiology School, which was headed by the great neurophysiologist Sir Charles Sherrington. After completing his scholarship Florey spent a summer as the physician on an Arctic expedition and the following year as a research student at Cambridge University. He then accepted a fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation in New York that enabled him to work in the laboratory of American pharmacologist Alfred Newton Richards at the University of Pennsylvania. Soon after he returned to England, he began working toward a PhD in pathology at Cambridge. There he was inspired by the biochemist Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins, head of the Sir William Dunn Institute of Biochemistry and famous for his work on vitamins. Florey also worked with Albert Szent-Györgyi, who was trying to isolate vitamin C.