Break in the penicillin mould

Press, 18 November 1981, Page 17

Break in the penicillin mould

Howard Florey is the forgotten man in the history of the development of penicillin. Now he has received his just reward. TERRY COLEMAN, of the “Guardian,” London, reports.

AU the world knows of Alexander Fleming’s part in the discovery and development of penicillin. In 1928, he observed the famous mould. In 1929, he named it penicillin. The result was immortality, a Nobel Prize, and streets and squares in many countries named after him. But last week, a memorial was unveiled in Westminster Abbey to Howard Florey, a man known to few who are not doctors or scientists, but who is described by his principal champion as “the main creator of penicillin therapy.”

This champion is Professor R. G. Macfarlane, quondam Fellow of All Souls and former professor of clinical pathology at Oxford, who in a biography of Florey published in 1979, and in his essay on Florey in the latest supplement to the Dictionary of National Biography, has explained how the credit came generally to be given to Fleming.

“When the tremendous fact of penicillin therapy became popular news,” he writes, “Florey was unwilling to talk to reporters. Fleming had less reserve, and articles appeared in which he was

portrayed as the hero of a long struggle to harness the discovery . . .”

Florey was an Australian, born in Adelaide in 1898, who came to Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship and then went as medical officer on an Arctic expedition, during which he began to suffer from chronic mucous gastritis. To oversimplify matters, his experi- , ments on mucus led to an interest in a bacteria-dissolv-ing enzyme called ~lyzom,e, and then, in conjunction with the chemist Ernst Chain, to a , study of Fleming’s penicillin.

According to Macfarlane, though it was Fleming who had “discovered the antibacterial power of a rather rare sort of mould,” he had not developed it, and it was Florey’s work that led to the practical use of penicillin. It was he who treated war wounds with penicillin on the battlefields of North Africa in 1943. The rest is history.

Florey’s experience enabled him to give much practical advice to the war surgeons. But, as Andre Maurois recalls in his biography of Fleming, Florey was anxious to point out that penicillin was not a universal panacea.

“Certain microbes are susceptible to it, others not. The first thing to be done in every case was to make a culture of the infecting germs and to carry out a test which would show the degree of their sensitivity to penicillin.

“Where the experiment showed that they were vulnerable, then penicillin could be administered and the wound stitched up. The surgeons had to reconsider much of their earlier knowledge and methods.” More than usually spectacular, . Maurois recalls, were the results obtained in the fight against gonorrhoea.

which- penicillin mastered in 12 hours. “This was of capital importance in the armies, for military hospitals were filled with venereal cases.”

Perhaps Professor Macfarlane, in redressing the balance, had redressed it a bit too far. Fleming’s entry in the Dictionary of National Biography does not make him sound a man who would talk easily to reporters. It says he was jiot easy to know, reluctant to talk, and not a conversationalist. As one visitor put it — talking with him was like playing tennis with a man who, whenever you knocked the ball over to his side, put it in his pocket.

And though Florey may have remained unknown to the general public, his name has always been honoured in medicine and science. Fleming, Florey, and Chain shared the Nobel Prize. But honours apart, the

myth has gathered around Fleming’s name, and not Florey’s. Professor Macfarlane puts it this way: “Fleming was like a man who stumbles on a nugget of gold ... and then goes off to look for something else. Florey was like a man who goes back to the same spot and creates a gold mine.” At the service in the Abbey before the unveiling last week, Professor Frank Jenner, of the Australian National University at Canberra, made the same point in a different way. He said that when Florey came to penicillin it was a laboratory curiosity, but by his work he had initiated the antibiotic era. It was a work comparable with Lister’s development of antisepsis, or Simpson’s of anaesthesia. Lady Florey, Howard Florey’s widow, then unveiled the stone, which bears the inscription: “His vision, leadership, and research made penicillin available to mankind.” Alexander Fleming is buried in St Paul’s- Cathedral along with Nelson and Wren. Florey’s stone in the Abbey lies alongside those of Herschel and Darwin.