Here are a few comments from me. More to come in the next day or two, especially about Florey's famous work in Australia, particularly as one of that country's Nobel prize holders, and about his being one of the founders of the Australian National University.
Meanwhile, as for some of Sandemaniac's question...
Q1. How does the story as told in this book differ from your understanding before you read it?
Compared to the two other biographies about Howard Florey I have already read [see list below] this does bring in (a) more detail about Fleming’s own career, (b) his relation about his wife, especially during the time of the war , and (c) the detail about the competition for the Nobel Prize. The book for Ship of Fools, like those others, is easy to read, and with that actual ‘extra’ material, encouraged me to read right through with interest.
Completely missing from this book was Florey’s significant role in Australian science after he had left, particularly in the foundation of the Australian National University [see discussed as a separate topic coming later]
Q2. [to come later]
Q3. Should Florey’s personal life have been brought into the story as much as it was?
The book is presumably meant to be a popular biography, meaning a story about an important famous person. For that, it is customary to set out parts of what kind of a personality was, rather than only about what his notable achievements were held by; that would be more the kind of story as set out by the series of biographies published by the Royal Society, including stuff like a mention of [almost] every one of his working papers. The book we are discussing in USA, as this book was published originally, where taste is usually keen to put in a few parts of personal scandal behaviour, as many American popular readers are thought to like that. The others I have read were published originally in Britain or Australia, where both readers and lawyers have less taste in that direction.
Q4. Any of the key persona that you particularly feel positively or negatively about?
Like several others who have commented already, one of the few people who emerge from the story to be personally likeable, was Heatley. In Mason’s book caption of Heatley’s photo summarises him as “thin and taciturn technical genius”. Everyone in the lab were clearly favourably impressed by his many varied skills of handwork to devise and carry through whatever a scientist wanted obtained. Even Florey, who was repeatedly often seeking specialist work like that, even that as a very demanding boss, he maintained a high regard for Heatley. That sort of skill is very respected by other scientists, as a person like Heatley can make a working device, by only a rough concept of what may be required by a scientist of relatively clumsy hands - even for Florey’s own hands, which were good by most standards. When royalty payment for British workers on medicines later became paid, very few would have begrudged Heatley when he got several million dollars. (Chain offered a share of that same revenue, he declined it on the old-fashioned feature that had been universal for British medical researchers.)
Florey himself was very demanding on his colleagues, and very focussed on the project he was driving at (especially after it became clear it was potentially a huge positive benefit for the allies in WW2). He was much less considerate socially or to give praise and rewards for more ordinary workers. For several years he got on well with Chain, who similarly had high scientific brain and ability. Their feeling fell off only after Chain began to feel that he was not being given full respect for his share of the work accomplished.
Fleming was simply lucky. Though working respectively, he had accomplished nothing very notable in his career, and would have been another minor scientist until Florey and his followers managed to get penicillin research beginning afresh, then in controllable form, and then in the US firms to get the drug into industrial scale enough to be widely useful. So I reckon to see Fleming to have a small positive contribution to the antibiotic ‘explosion’ of major expansion of modern medicine healing, and certainly not negative.
But I do see very negative as the administrator of St Mary’s hospital, Mr Almroth Wright, who promoted to news reports as penicillin as a great credit by his hospital (which had actually virtually no role) for their worker (i.e. Fleming) inventing a wonder-healing drug, and touting for the hospital to be rewarding accordingly for donations. And the same can be added to Beaverbrook, the newspaper promoter.
Q5. Did anyone spot the comically cut-and-pasted photograph?
I haven’t seen the photo described by Sandemaniac, as I have only the online unpictured version of the book discussed here.
But in a photo in Brett Mason’s book "Wizards of Oz" (UNSW (2022) reproduced from a British news report of 1945 has what had been a raw photo of the three Nobel prize awardness with the king of Sweden, but with Florey and Chain visibly ruled out by the editor, so that only Fleming and the king to be used for printing in that British newspaper.
Q6. How easy or otherwise did you find the sciencey bits to follow?
It was easy enough for me, as I think it is not very technical. But then again, I have a PhD in science, even if mine is in Physics rather than Physiology.
I think that most of the people who had expressed an interest have now responded (and at least one I hadn't spotted!) - thank you all for your contributions, I will try to put in the comedy photo so everyone can see it.
I would be delighted if people discuss points others have made, or ask their own questions - I've probably a few of my own when I have a bit more spare time.
I've not really got anything to add, but I'm really glad you chose a non-fiction book @Sandemaniac. We probably ought to read more of them in the Ship of Fools Book Group.
Here a few more comments, including some response about Ethel from other readers.
Do you feel that the Oxford team have been fairly treated by history ? If not, why not?
It seems to be the opinion of medical scientists both working at the time and now via historians of science since then have given due credit to the Oxford team. I have yet to hear of any scientist who was awarded a Nobel Prize has been regarded as unworthy. [This does not always apply to Nobel winners of ‘Peace’ or ‘Literature’.] However for any particular field of scientific work that warranted may have quite a large number to be part who contributed to it, and each single Nobel prize is limited in each year to at most 3 winning scientist, all of whom have to alive in the year of nomination.
Recognition of such skill and work to general readers can however be much more known in a particular countries, especially in their own country.
A whole chapter in this book gives a detailed story about local publicity in Britain about the prize for penicillin. It makes it clear that (a) the members of the Nobel Committee in Sweden are sworn to secrecy for time in advance about the selection, and (b) Florey himself throughout this project sought himself and his team only for publication only in scientific journals, and funding only from the sort of bodies which are for the standard reason of research funding. Florey in particular had more than enough of his time to get on with the work itself, and declined to bother any work with news reports or other publicity. As I said to Q4, a much less honourable line was put widely by an official of St Mary’s hospital or (even worse) by the newspaper owner Beaverbrook. Consequently the great British public was put out only about Fleming.
At that time, the long tradition in medicine in Britain was that those who made discovery did share it publicly without any royalty. Among this habit was played by of course the Oxford group. It came as a rude shock that American researchers who he had Florey had openly given them his knowledge, the American companies differently insisted of paying their outcomes , so that Oxford had to pay for actual produced penicillin – which he certainly did not regard as “fairly treated”.
Florey’s role at/ for Australian national research
Florey was one of the major players in the planning for the Australian National University, which was set up after WW2 to raise the national level of scientific research in Australia. Being a book not made from Australia, this part of his life gets not any mention, but may be of interest of it to some other readers.
Before that there were 6 small universities, one in each separate State, none of which took any serious institutional role in research. But led by the Australian Prime Minister of 1946 and the visionary senior public servant “Nugget” Coombs set up by the national law a new national research-based university, as the wartime had made clear a much greater role for locally-based research. It was to be placed in Canberra, the “neutral” national capital. Four eminent expatriate researchers were nominated to lead the schools of the new university, with Florey (having just won the Nobel Prize) being the most famous of them all. He duly wrote some detailed planning papers and took place in numerous planning meetings, and nominated several leading specialists to lead the various departments within that school. But he never himself became as a resident on-site Director, feeling perhaps that he pined too much having an established physical facility at Oxford and enjoying his new prestigious role in Britain as President of the Royal Society. Right through to 1957, when a full building was opened for the School of Medical Research , Florey remained as Adviser (or as he called it) “de facto absentee Director”, as another professor, who was actually on site, operated as administrative chairman, communicating frequently with Florey. After attending the formal opening of the new building, Florey finally formally resigned.
But several years later in the 1960s, Florey was made the formal chairman of the University, who main role is to set the ceremony of awarding degrees. By that time, the university had opened to include undergraduates, of which I was one. I remember Florey in person one year that he was a good natured participant in the week of the undergraduates “rag week”.
Who and when did get penicillin synthetic ?
According to MIT (USA) it took that about 1000 attempts to make synthetic penicillin during WW2 all failed. The chemical structure of natural penicillin was found first by Dorothy Hodgkin (of a different Oxford department) identified in 1945. This opened potential for synthesis – some years later, and much easier and cheaper to produce widely. It was part of the work for her award several years later of a Nobel Prize.
Most scientists gave away attempting synthesis before that but JC Sheehan succeded after about a 9 years (which by then he patented some version) . Alongside he got several other useful antibiotics.
[https://historycambridge.org/innovation/Synthetic Penicillin.html ]
list of some related books
L Bickel “Florey the man who made penicillin” (Angus & Robertson 1972) [ some editions published as “Rise up to life”] .
Brett Mason “Wizards of Oz” (UNSW 2022) .
SG Foster & M Varghese “The Making of the Australian National University” (Allen & Unwin 1996)
Further discussion : how did his wife keep going?
Several readers have commented here about Ethel Florey, his wife, but maybe I can add a little more discussion.
She had been the only female in the same medical class at Adelaide with Howard, and was therefore one of few young women that she knew fairly well , as even then she was more focussed on her work than playing much with women. Like Howard’s own older sister , though I learnt in another biography, was also a doctor. Ethel sounds as though she, like that sister, would have to been a strong person as such a student. She seemed happy enough to carry on her medical career in Adelaide. As he started as a dedicated research worker in England, Howard would have met very few women, and began to seek one he knew. So he wrote many letters to Ethel, as his memory increased by time probably of a memory that he came to think her more fond as a person. The same seems to have happened when he was away in Africa, and could relate to her only by correspondence, as Celtic Knotweed points out. He was a person not easy to get on with at any time, and undoubtedly worse if her hearing was not always right – so he deleted her quickly from his lab team after a few misunderstandings.
From a brief separate biography of her I gather that his few years of working with the hospital team in England as the new drug became available, but her only subsequent work report that I’ve found was that she wrote a long treatise on antibiotics, of which the history of penicillin makes one of its volumes.
I had a look at Trove (a free Australian archive of newspapers and other documents) and found there was not a lot of articles about Ethel Florey (although I haven't looked under Mrs. Howard Florey or Mrs. H. Florey yet). This article paints her as a hero in the development of penicillin but is only found in two small newspapers from the area of Wyalkatchem in Western Australia. No author is listed and it may have been copied from a larger newspaper, but this is not listed either. I'm not sure if non-Australians can access the link https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/240222426?searchTerm=ethel florey
As many of you may know, Lord Beaverbrook was from New Brunswick, Canada. My hometown includes a Lord Beaverbrook arena and the capital ( Fredericton) is the home of the Beaverbrook Art Gallery.
I've found a few minutes to add some of the photo from the book to Flickr. The set-up with the two books is a (rather later) conference presentation by Edward Abrahams, obviously his own copy by the flyleaf, a lovely glass measuring cylinder from Norman's shed, a vial of crude penicillin (25000 units), and some of the porcelain cylinders Norman had made for activity assays. Probably my most prized scientific stuff (not that I have much else). I wonder if the cylinder is hand-made, as I can't make sense of the units.
The photos are the spread with the comedy photo in (note also Norman at the bench, top row centre left, who is setting up porcelain cylinders in a petri dish), and the diagram of Sanders' apparatus with the bath tub top left.
Thank you, Caissa, I enjoyed that although I had far too many other things going in in my life to give it the attention I'd hoped. That's my fault for having no sense of proportion.
I particularly enjoyed the contributions from elsewhere in the globe where Florey is better known, so the perspective is different.
One thing I had meant to mention, and didn't, is that the story that Albert Alexander caught the infection that killed him from a rose thorn in his garden is just that, a story.
There's no mention of it in his medical notes - no notes of cause at all, in fact - and the rose story seems to have emerged in the 1970s. What in fact seems to have happened was that Albert, as a Police Constable, was forwarded from Berkshire to Southampton, and was injured in the Blitz on Southampton in November-December 1940. Certainly casualty records include PCs from Berkshire among the wounded.
I got that information via his granddaugher, who got it from her mother. Who got to visit the Dunn School in what will probably be her last visit to the UK last year: https://flic.kr/p/2qJF9s8
Thanks to everyone who joined in for their thoughts!
Comments
Meanwhile, as for some of Sandemaniac's question...
Q1. How does the story as told in this book differ from your understanding before you read it?
Compared to the two other biographies about Howard Florey I have already read [see list below] this does bring in (a) more detail about Fleming’s own career, (b) his relation about his wife, especially during the time of the war , and (c) the detail about the competition for the Nobel Prize. The book for Ship of Fools, like those others, is easy to read, and with that actual ‘extra’ material, encouraged me to read right through with interest.
Completely missing from this book was Florey’s significant role in Australian science after he had left, particularly in the foundation of the Australian National University [see discussed as a separate topic coming later]
Q2. [to come later]
Q3. Should Florey’s personal life have been brought into the story as much as it was?
The book is presumably meant to be a popular biography, meaning a story about an important famous person. For that, it is customary to set out parts of what kind of a personality was, rather than only about what his notable achievements were held by; that would be more the kind of story as set out by the series of biographies published by the Royal Society, including stuff like a mention of [almost] every one of his working papers. The book we are discussing in USA, as this book was published originally, where taste is usually keen to put in a few parts of personal scandal behaviour, as many American popular readers are thought to like that. The others I have read were published originally in Britain or Australia, where both readers and lawyers have less taste in that direction.
Q4. Any of the key persona that you particularly feel positively or negatively about?
Like several others who have commented already, one of the few people who emerge from the story to be personally likeable, was Heatley. In Mason’s book caption of Heatley’s photo summarises him as “thin and taciturn technical genius”. Everyone in the lab were clearly favourably impressed by his many varied skills of handwork to devise and carry through whatever a scientist wanted obtained. Even Florey, who was repeatedly often seeking specialist work like that, even that as a very demanding boss, he maintained a high regard for Heatley. That sort of skill is very respected by other scientists, as a person like Heatley can make a working device, by only a rough concept of what may be required by a scientist of relatively clumsy hands - even for Florey’s own hands, which were good by most standards. When royalty payment for British workers on medicines later became paid, very few would have begrudged Heatley when he got several million dollars. (Chain offered a share of that same revenue, he declined it on the old-fashioned feature that had been universal for British medical researchers.)
Florey himself was very demanding on his colleagues, and very focussed on the project he was driving at (especially after it became clear it was potentially a huge positive benefit for the allies in WW2). He was much less considerate socially or to give praise and rewards for more ordinary workers. For several years he got on well with Chain, who similarly had high scientific brain and ability. Their feeling fell off only after Chain began to feel that he was not being given full respect for his share of the work accomplished.
Fleming was simply lucky. Though working respectively, he had accomplished nothing very notable in his career, and would have been another minor scientist until Florey and his followers managed to get penicillin research beginning afresh, then in controllable form, and then in the US firms to get the drug into industrial scale enough to be widely useful. So I reckon to see Fleming to have a small positive contribution to the antibiotic ‘explosion’ of major expansion of modern medicine healing, and certainly not negative.
But I do see very negative as the administrator of St Mary’s hospital, Mr Almroth Wright, who promoted to news reports as penicillin as a great credit by his hospital (which had actually virtually no role) for their worker (i.e. Fleming) inventing a wonder-healing drug, and touting for the hospital to be rewarding accordingly for donations. And the same can be added to Beaverbrook, the newspaper promoter.
Q5. Did anyone spot the comically cut-and-pasted photograph?
I haven’t seen the photo described by Sandemaniac, as I have only the online unpictured version of the book discussed here.
But in a photo in Brett Mason’s book "Wizards of Oz" (UNSW (2022) reproduced from a British news report of 1945 has what had been a raw photo of the three Nobel prize awardness with the king of Sweden, but with Florey and Chain visibly ruled out by the editor, so that only Fleming and the king to be used for printing in that British newspaper.
Q6. How easy or otherwise did you find the sciencey bits to follow?
It was easy enough for me, as I think it is not very technical. But then again, I have a PhD in science, even if mine is in Physics rather than Physiology.
I would be delighted if people discuss points others have made, or ask their own questions - I've probably a few of my own when I have a bit more spare time.
Do you feel that the Oxford team have been fairly treated by history ? If not, why not?
It seems to be the opinion of medical scientists both working at the time and now via historians of science since then have given due credit to the Oxford team. I have yet to hear of any scientist who was awarded a Nobel Prize has been regarded as unworthy. [This does not always apply to Nobel winners of ‘Peace’ or ‘Literature’.] However for any particular field of scientific work that warranted may have quite a large number to be part who contributed to it, and each single Nobel prize is limited in each year to at most 3 winning scientist, all of whom have to alive in the year of nomination.
Recognition of such skill and work to general readers can however be much more known in a particular countries, especially in their own country.
A whole chapter in this book gives a detailed story about local publicity in Britain about the prize for penicillin. It makes it clear that (a) the members of the Nobel Committee in Sweden are sworn to secrecy for time in advance about the selection, and (b) Florey himself throughout this project sought himself and his team only for publication only in scientific journals, and funding only from the sort of bodies which are for the standard reason of research funding. Florey in particular had more than enough of his time to get on with the work itself, and declined to bother any work with news reports or other publicity. As I said to Q4, a much less honourable line was put widely by an official of St Mary’s hospital or (even worse) by the newspaper owner Beaverbrook. Consequently the great British public was put out only about Fleming.
At that time, the long tradition in medicine in Britain was that those who made discovery did share it publicly without any royalty. Among this habit was played by of course the Oxford group. It came as a rude shock that American researchers who he had Florey had openly given them his knowledge, the American companies differently insisted of paying their outcomes , so that Oxford had to pay for actual produced penicillin – which he certainly did not regard as “fairly treated”.
Florey’s role at/ for Australian national research
Florey was one of the major players in the planning for the Australian National University, which was set up after WW2 to raise the national level of scientific research in Australia. Being a book not made from Australia, this part of his life gets not any mention, but may be of interest of it to some other readers.
Before that there were 6 small universities, one in each separate State, none of which took any serious institutional role in research. But led by the Australian Prime Minister of 1946 and the visionary senior public servant “Nugget” Coombs set up by the national law a new national research-based university, as the wartime had made clear a much greater role for locally-based research. It was to be placed in Canberra, the “neutral” national capital. Four eminent expatriate researchers were nominated to lead the schools of the new university, with Florey (having just won the Nobel Prize) being the most famous of them all. He duly wrote some detailed planning papers and took place in numerous planning meetings, and nominated several leading specialists to lead the various departments within that school. But he never himself became as a resident on-site Director, feeling perhaps that he pined too much having an established physical facility at Oxford and enjoying his new prestigious role in Britain as President of the Royal Society. Right through to 1957, when a full building was opened for the School of Medical Research , Florey remained as Adviser (or as he called it) “de facto absentee Director”, as another professor, who was actually on site, operated as administrative chairman, communicating frequently with Florey. After attending the formal opening of the new building, Florey finally formally resigned.
But several years later in the 1960s, Florey was made the formal chairman of the University, who main role is to set the ceremony of awarding degrees. By that time, the university had opened to include undergraduates, of which I was one. I remember Florey in person one year that he was a good natured participant in the week of the undergraduates “rag week”.
Who and when did get penicillin synthetic ?
According to MIT (USA) it took that about 1000 attempts to make synthetic penicillin during WW2 all failed. The chemical structure of natural penicillin was found first by Dorothy Hodgkin (of a different Oxford department) identified in 1945. This opened potential for synthesis – some years later, and much easier and cheaper to produce widely. It was part of the work for her award several years later of a Nobel Prize.
Most scientists gave away attempting synthesis before that but JC Sheehan succeded after about a 9 years (which by then he patented some version) . Alongside he got several other useful antibiotics.
[https://historycambridge.org/innovation/Synthetic Penicillin.html ]
list of some related books
L Bickel “Florey the man who made penicillin” (Angus & Robertson 1972) [ some editions published as “Rise up to life”] .
Brett Mason “Wizards of Oz” (UNSW 2022) .
SG Foster & M Varghese “The Making of the Australian National University” (Allen & Unwin 1996)
Further discussion : how did his wife keep going?
Several readers have commented here about Ethel Florey, his wife, but maybe I can add a little more discussion.
She had been the only female in the same medical class at Adelaide with Howard, and was therefore one of few young women that she knew fairly well , as even then she was more focussed on her work than playing much with women. Like Howard’s own older sister , though I learnt in another biography, was also a doctor. Ethel sounds as though she, like that sister, would have to been a strong person as such a student. She seemed happy enough to carry on her medical career in Adelaide. As he started as a dedicated research worker in England, Howard would have met very few women, and began to seek one he knew. So he wrote many letters to Ethel, as his memory increased by time probably of a memory that he came to think her more fond as a person. The same seems to have happened when he was away in Africa, and could relate to her only by correspondence, as Celtic Knotweed points out. He was a person not easy to get on with at any time, and undoubtedly worse if her hearing was not always right – so he deleted her quickly from his lab team after a few misunderstandings.
From a brief separate biography of her I gather that his few years of working with the hospital team in England as the new drug became available, but her only subsequent work report that I’ve found was that she wrote a long treatise on antibiotics, of which the history of penicillin makes one of its volumes.
The photos are the spread with the comedy photo in (note also Norman at the bench, top row centre left, who is setting up porcelain cylinders in a petri dish), and the diagram of Sanders' apparatus with the bath tub top left.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/gray1720/albums/72177720323477044
I particularly enjoyed the contributions from elsewhere in the globe where Florey is better known, so the perspective is different.
One thing I had meant to mention, and didn't, is that the story that Albert Alexander caught the infection that killed him from a rose thorn in his garden is just that, a story.
There's no mention of it in his medical notes - no notes of cause at all, in fact - and the rose story seems to have emerged in the 1970s. What in fact seems to have happened was that Albert, as a Police Constable, was forwarded from Berkshire to Southampton, and was injured in the Blitz on Southampton in November-December 1940. Certainly casualty records include PCs from Berkshire among the wounded.
I got that information via his granddaugher, who got it from her mother. Who got to visit the Dunn School in what will probably be her last visit to the UK last year: https://flic.kr/p/2qJF9s8
Thanks to everyone who joined in for their thoughts!