Howard Walter Florey was born on 24 September 1898 at Adelaide. He was educated at St Peter's Collegiate School and at Adelaide University where he graduated in medicine in 1921. He then came to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and worked under Sherrington, obtaining a First in the Honour School of Physiology and the BSc degree. In 1924 he spent a year in Cambridge, and then visited America as a Rockefeller Travelling Fellow. Between 1926 and 1935 he held a number of research appointments in pathology at Cambridge, at the London Hospital, and Sheffield, ultimately becoming Professor of Pathology at Oxford and a Fellow of Lincoln College in 1935. It was there that he commenced, in collaboration, with E B Chain, the systematic study of naturally occurring antibacterial substances, and although by 1940 he had recognized the remarkable potential of penicillin which had been described some years earlier by Fleming, he was still doubtful if it could be produced in sufficient quantity to be used extensively clinically. However, once its chemical formula was known it became possible to manufacture it, though war-time conditions prevented this being undertaken in Britain. Florey therefore went to the United States to elicit the help of chemical manufacturers there, and it thus came about that by "D-day" enough penicillin was available to treat all the battle casualties. In 1926 Florey married Mary Ethel Reed whom he had met as a fellow medical student in Adelaide, and she helped in his research by carrying out the first clinical trials of penicillin, and later became a specialist in chemotherapy. Many honours were bestowed on Howard Florey, for in 1941 he was elected FRS, he was knighted in 1944, with Chain and Fleming he shared the Nobel Prize in 1945, and in 1965 he was awarded the Order of Merit and appointed a Life Peer. In 1961 he was admitted to the Honorary Fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons in the course of the Annual General Meeting which was held that year in Sheffield, the city where Florey had worked some 25 years earlier. He was President of the Royal Society from 1960 to 1965, and in 1962 he retired from the Chair of Pathology to become Provost of Queen's College, Oxford, where he died suddenly on 21 February 1968. Lady Florey died in 1966; they had had a son and a daughter. In 1967 he married the Hon Dr Margaret Jennings and she survived him.