The 1998 $1 Fine Silver Proof Coin captured the tenacity of Howard Florey
and his research team in their efforts to make antibiotics available. Australian pathologist and co
discoverer of penicillin. Born in Adelaide, Australia, and educated in medicine at the University of
Adelaide, he later studied and taught in England. In 1935 he was appointed director of the Dunn
School of Pathology, University of Oxford. Florey studied naturally occurring antibacterials, of
which the Penicillium mold discovered by Sir Alexander Fleming seemed the most promising. In 1939
Florey and the German-British biochemist Ernst Boris Chain isolated the active agent, penicillin,
from a fraction of the mold and formulated procedures for extraction and production. With British
industries affected by World War II, Florey took his process to the United States, where private and
government laboratories produced sufficient quantities to combat bacterial infection in wounded
soldiers. For his work he was knighted in 1944, shared the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in
1945 with Chain and Fleming, was elected president of the Royal Society in 1960, and was created a
life peer in 1965.
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