Published Resources Details
Book Section
- Title
- Miracle mould: Howard Walter Florey
- In
- Australia's Nobel laureates vol. III: state of our innovation nation, 2021 and beyond
- Imprint
- One Mandate Group, 2021, pp. 32-43
- ISBN/ISSN
- 9780646830957
- Url
- https://publications.innovatia.au/view/404883545/36/
- Format
- Contains
- Image
- Description
Also freely available online, pdf pages 36-47.
- Abstract
For a man who was not thinking much about relieving human suffering while he was experimenting with penicillin, Sir Howard Florey made one of the greatest contributions to that quest.
Of all of Australia's Nobel Laureates, Howard Florey is arguably the one whose work has provided human kind with the most profound benefits. Former prime minister Sir Robert Menzies once said that Florey had a greater effect on the welfare of the world than any other Australian. Through his central role in bringing the life saving miracle of penicillin to the world, thereby ushering in the era of antibiotics, Florey's enduring legacy ranks him as a genuine giant in the world of public health. Without antibiotics, millions of people - and countless domestic animals and livestock - would have died or suffered serious illnesses from bacterial infections. It is easy to forget that before antibiotics became available, common infections took an appalling toll on human life. Many infants and mothers died in, or soon after, childbirth; tuberculosis and bacterial pneumonia were often deadly; and one bacterium alone - the infamous golden staph (Staphylococcus aureus) - killed eight out of every 10 people infected after sustaining even the slightest wound.
Yet Florey claimed such concerns did not motivate his research. "People sometimes think that I and the others worked on penicillin because we were interested in suffering humanity," he told Hazel de Berg in 1967, in a taped interview at the National Library in Canberra. "I don't think it ever crossed our minds about suffering humanity. This was an interesting scientific exercise, and, because it was of some use in medicine, is very gratifying, but this was not the reason that we started working on it."
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- Brescia, Paul [Managing Editor], Australia's Nobel Laureates. vol III : state of our innovation nation : 2021 and beyond (Roseville, New South Wales: One Mandate Group, 2021), 704 pages : colour illustrations, colour portraits pp, https://publications.innovatia.au/view/404883545/. Details