Howard Walter Florey, Baron Florey of Adelaide and Marston, OM FRS FRCP (pronounced /ˈflɔːri/; September 24, 1898 – February 21, 1968) was an Australian scientist who worked as a pharmacologist and pathologist. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1945 with Ernst Chain and Sir Alexander Fleming for their discovery of penicillin and its ability to cure infectious diseases.
Although Fleming received much of the credit for discovering penicillin, Florey and his team at the University of Oxford were the first to develop it into a practical and effective medicine. This happened ten years after Fleming stopped working on it. Florey’s team created methods to grow, purify, and produce the drug. They tested it on animals to check for safety and effectiveness and performed the first human trials. In 1941, they used penicillin to treat a police officer from Oxford. The officer began to recover but later died because Florey could not produce enough of the drug at that time. Later trials in Britain, the United States, and North Africa were very successful.
Florey graduated from the University of Adelaide. He later studied at the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and in the United States through a fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation. In 1935, he became the director of the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology at Oxford. He gathered a team of scientists from different fields to work on major research projects. In addition to his work on penicillin, he studied other topics, including lysozyme, contraception, and cephalosporins. He helped start the Australian National University in Canberra and its John Curtin School of Medical Research. He served as chancellor of the Australian National University from 1965 until his death in 1968. Florey was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1941 and served as its president from 1960 to 1965. During his presidency, he oversaw the Royal Society’s move to new buildings at Carlton House Terrace and helped create connections with European organizations. In 1962, he became provost of The Queen’s College, Oxford.
Florey’s discoveries are believed to have saved more than 80 million lives. He is considered one of Australia’s most important scientific and medical figures. Australian Prime Minister Sir Robert Menzies once said, “In terms of world well-being, Florey was the most important man ever born in Australia.”
Early life and education
Howard Walter Florey was born on September 24, 1898, in Malvern, a southern suburb of Adelaide, South Australia. His last name sounds like the word "sorry." He was the only son of Joseph Florey, a bootmaker from Oxfordshire, England. Joseph moved to London as a child, where his grandfather started a bootmaking business. Joseph’s first wife was Charlotte Ames, and they had two daughters: Charlotte, born in 1880, and Anne, born in 1882. After Charlotte became very sick with a lung disease, the family moved to South Australia, hoping the climate would help her health. Her condition worsened, and she died in April 1886. Joseph later opened his own bootmaking business in Adelaide and married Bertha Mary Waldham, the daughter of his housekeeper. Their first child, Hilda, was born on September 6, 1890. Hilda became a bacteriologist and helped develop laboratory medicine. A second daughter, Valetta, was born in 1891. Therefore, Florey had two older sisters and two older half-sisters.
In 1906, the family moved to "Coreega," a large home in Mitcham, a suburb of Adelaide. Florey attended Unley Park School, a local private school, traveling two miles (3.2 kilometers) each day by horse-drawn tram with a friend named Mollie Clampett, who lived near Coreega. At school, he earned the nickname "Floss," a common short form of "Florence." In 1908, he transferred to Kyre College, a private boys’ school. In 1911, he joined St. Peter’s College in Adelaide, where he excelled in chemistry, physics, mathematics, and history. He played sports such as cricket, Australian football, tennis, and track and field events like sprinting and high jumping. His education was funded by four scholarships. He joined the Senior Cadets and was promoted to second lieutenant in August 1916. When World War I began in 1914, Florey wanted to enlist, but his parents did not allow it. He was head boy in his final year of school and ranked twelfth in the state in his final exams.
Instead of becoming a businessman like his father, Florey chose to follow his sister Hilda’s path and study medicine. He enrolled at the University of Adelaide in March 1917, with his fees fully covered by a state scholarship. This allowed him to continue his studies after his father died of a heart attack on September 15, 1918. His father’s shoe business had become unable to pay its debts and was closed. Coreega and other properties were sold, and in 1920, the family moved into a small house in Glen Osmond. At university, Florey participated in athletics and tennis. He edited the Medical Students’ Society’s Review and the Adelaide University Magazine. He met Mary Ethel Hayter Reed, a fellow medical student, when he asked her to write an article about Women in Medicine for the magazine.
Rhodes Scholar
Florey chose to study medicine, a field that required learning in other countries. In August 1920, he applied for a Rhodes Scholarship to study at the University of Oxford in England. He was selected as the successful candidate for South Australia on 8 December. This was a great honor and included a payment of £300 (about $47,000 in 2022). The Rhodes Committee wanted him to begin in October, the start of the academic year at Oxford. This meant either waiting a year for his scholarship or delaying his final medical exams until he returned. Florey refused to do either; he would take his exams and start at Oxford in January 1922. With the help of Sir Archibald Weigall, the Governor of South Australia, Florey won the argument. He passed his exams with second-class honors and received his Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery degree in December 1921 while still in Australia. During the summer break, he worked as a clinical assistant at Broken Hill Hospital.
On 11 December 1921, Florey traveled to England from Port Adelaide on the SS Otira, an ocean liner, and worked as the ship’s surgeon. The ship arrived in Hull on 24 January 1922, and Florey took a train to London, where his sister Anne met him at King’s Cross Station. Two days later, he traveled to Oxford and met the Secretary of the Rhodes Trust, Francis James Wylie. He chose to study at Magdalen College, Oxford, where his high school teacher, Henry Girdlestone, had also studied. He joined the honor school of physiology, studying under Sir Charles Scott Sherrington. During summer breaks, he visited France, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Czechoslovakia, and Austria. He worked as a demonstrator in the physiology department and applied for a fellowship in physiology at Merton College but was not chosen. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1924. At Sherrington’s suggestion, he studied the cerebral cortex of cats. A paper about this research was published in Brain in March 1925. His thesis, titled "The capillary circulation together with associated observations made in connexion with this investigation," was reviewed by John Scott Haldane and John Gillies Priestley on 2 May 1925, and he earned a Bachelor of Science degree.
Florey was chosen for a John Lucas Walker Studentship at the University of Cambridge for the 1924–1925 academic year. This included £300 in payment and £200 for equipment. Before starting this position, he joined the 1924 Oxford University Arctic Expedition as the medical officer. In July 1925, he received a fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation to study in the United States. He traveled to New York on the RMS Caronia on 19 September 1925, planning to study under Robert Chambers at Cornell University Medical College. However, the tool he needed for his research on brain blood vessels was not available, so he worked instead at the laboratory of Alfred Newton Richards at the University of Pennsylvania. He later joined Chambers in March 1926. He hoped to return to the UK through Australia to marry Ethel Reed in Adelaide, but in November 1925, he accepted a research position at London Hospital. This job offered five years of employment and a yearly salary of £850 (about £45,000 in 2025), but he had to start immediately. Florey negotiated a delay until May 1926. He returned to the UK on 13 May. Ethel joined him in September, and they married at Holy Trinity, Paddington, on 19 October.
Early career
Florey was not happy working at London Hospital because he did not like the long daily trip from Chobham, which made his experiments depend on train schedules. In the summer, Howard and Ethel lived in a flat in Belsize Park so he could spend more time on his work. He wrote about his research on lacteals and lymphatic capillaries from New York, which was published in the Journal of Physiology in 1927.
Florey then started writing a thesis for a fellowship at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he became an unofficial fellow in 1926. His thesis on "Physiology and pathology of the circulation of the blood and lymph" was accepted, and he received his fellowship in 1927. He also continued his work on mucus secretion. London Hospital’s lab facilities were not good enough for his research, so he did experiments at Oxford and Cambridge. However, he studied lacteals in patients who had abdominal surgery.
The sudden death of British pathologist Thomas Strangeways on 23 December 1926 created a vacancy for the Huddersfield Lectureship in Special Pathology at Cambridge, which was offered to Florey. At Cambridge, Florey had a secure job and better lab facilities, though his salary of £900 (about £48,000 in 2025) was only slightly higher. He disliked teaching but was pleased that he helped design a new tripos course with Alan Nigel Drury. He hired fourteen-year-old Jim Kent as his assistant. At Cambridge, lab technicians rotated between departments, which trained them well but made it hard for researchers to keep assistants. Florey found it difficult to find a good assistant because his reputation for working hard and having high standards was known. He arranged for Kent to stay as his assistant permanently, and Kent remained in that role for forty years.
The Floreys bought a house in Cambridge, and Florey cycled to work every day, including Sundays, arriving at 10:00, except on class days when he arrived earlier. Ethel worked on two papers with Drury and Albert Szent-Györgyi but stopped going to the lab after she became pregnant. In 1929, she joined Florey in Spain, where Sherrington arranged for him to study nerve staining with Santiago Ramón y Cajal. They named their daughter, born on 26 September 1929, Paquita Mary Joanna. Two years later, they spent the summer with French scientist Pol Bouin in Strasbourg, where Florey studied mucinogen, a chemical that makes mucin.
In January 1929, Florey began studying lysozyme, an enzyme in the immune system of animals. For Florey, this was a natural extension of his work on mucus. Lysozyme is found in secretions with mucus, and Florey wondered if it was a property of mucus. He learned how to test for lysozyme and identified it chemically. He tested animals and found that dogs, rabbits, and guinea pigs had lysozyme in their secretions, but cats had very little, and goats had none, except in their tears. In a paper published in 1930, Florey concluded that lysozyme played little role in natural immunity.
There were few chances for promotion at Cambridge. Florey hoped for a chair in experimental medicine, but it was not created until 1945. He worked with biochemist Marjory Stephenson on his lysozyme project, but their results were not published because she could not spare time for another department’s research. He wanted an interdisciplinary team and funding for work beyond his own. The death of James Sholto Cameron Douglas on 30 October 1931 created a vacancy for the Joseph Hunter chair of pathology at the University of Sheffield, and Florey decided to apply.
Florey was not a pathologist, and Scottish pathologist Robert Muir said, "There is no pathologist named Florey." The faculty board took a chance on Florey, and he was appointed on 9 December. He started his job in March 1932. The Floreys moved for the fourth time in five years to a Victorian manor near the university, which later became student housing called "Florey Lodge." The chair came with a salary of £1,000 (about £57,000 in 2025) per year, but no assistant was provided. Florey took Kent with him and eventually secured 50 shillings a week (about £141 in 2025) for him from the Medical Research Council (MRC). Guy’s Hospital in London offered Florey a chair in pathology in February 1933, which alarmed the university because it had recently lost two senior professors. The university raised his salary to £1,200 per year to keep him.
The Sheffield Medical School had only about fourteen students each year. The lack of a top pathologist was fixed when Beatrice Pullinger joined the staff in January 1934, and she helped Florey improve research and teaching. While Florey focused on lysozyme, he also studied other topics. The death of his brother-in-law, John Gardner, from tetanus led Florey to research the disease with Paul Fildes and H. E. Harding. He also studied the lymphatic system with Pullinger and continued his work on contraception with Harry Carleton, which he had started at London Hospital.
Florey’s son Charles du Vé was born in Sheffield on 11 September 1934, but for a time, Florey and Ethel had communication problems and even considered a legal separation. This was a serious issue because no Oxford fellow divorced without resigning their fellowship until the 1950s.
Despite improving the pathology department at Sheffield, Florey had bigger goals than staying there. An opportunity arose when Georges Dreyer, the chair of pathology at Oxford’s Sir William Dunn School, died on 17 August 1934. Dreyer had built a new laboratory, but it
Penicillin
During his research on lysozyme, Chain read articles about the enzyme in the British Journal of Experimental Pathology by Alexander Fleming in volumes 3 and 8, and by Florey in volume 11. While reading, he found Fleming’s paper in volume 10, which described the antibacterial effects of Penicillium notatum mold. Fleming’s mistaken belief that penicillin was a bactericidal enzyme led Chain to think it might be similar to lysozyme. At the time, the office had a money shortage of £500 (about £31,000 today), and Florey had to stop buying more equipment. Chain and Florey decided to start a large research project on antibacterial substances made by microorganisms to attract long-term funding. They initially studied three sources: Bacillus subtilis, Trueperella pyogenes, and penicillin mold. Florey later said:
Florey asked the MRC for funding in September 1939, shortly after World War II began. Mellanby approved the project, giving £250 (about £14,128 today) to start it, with £300 for salaries and £100 for expenses each year for three years. Florey thought more money would be needed. On 1 November 1939, Henry M. "Dusty" Miller, Jr., from the Rockefeller Foundation, visited to discuss funding for Heatley’s position. Heatley had left Chain and accepted a job at the Carlsberg Laboratory in Copenhagen on a Rockefeller Fellowship, but because of the war, he stayed at Oxford. Miller helped Heatley keep his fellowship. Instead of working for Chain, Heatley would report directly to Florey as his research assistant.
As a bacteriologist, Miller supported the antibacterial project. He encouraged Florey to apply for a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation and told his headquarters to consider the request seriously. In his application letter, Florey wrote that the work had both theoretical importance and practical value for medicine. The Rockefeller Foundation approved the request, giving US$5,000 (£1,250) each year for five years.
Florey’s team already had a sample of penicillin mold. Dreyer had received a sample in 1930 for his work on bacteriophages but lost interest when he found it was not a bacteriophage. Campbell-Renton continued growing it. The team developed methods to grow the mold on liquid Czapek-Dox medium. Since most containers were not flat, glass bottles were placed on their sides. Later, special containers were made. As the lab became a penicillin factory, Florey hired six women to help with cultivation and extraction. The work had to be done under sterile conditions. Abraham and Chain found that some airborne bacteria produced penicillinase, an enzyme that breaks down penicillin.
Heatley and Chain worked on extracting penicillin from the mold. They filtered the liquid through parachute silk to remove mycelium, spores, and debris. They added phosphoric acid to lower the pH and cooled the liquid. Penicillin could then be drawn out with a solvent. Diethyl ether was used at first, but it was very flammable. Chain suggested using amyl acetate, which was less flammable, and it worked. Separating the penicillin from the solvent was a problem. Heatley thought that if penicillin moved from water to solvent when the solution was acidic, it might move back when the solution was alkaline. Florey told him to try it. This method, called "reverse extraction," worked. Chain suggested freeze-drying to remove water without harming penicillin. The team developed a full process for growing, extracting, and purifying penicillin, creating a dry, brown powder. By early 1942, they made a highly purified compound and proposed its chemical formula. Heatley created an assay method. An Oxford unit was defined as the purity needed to make a 25 mm bacteria-free ring. This was a rough measure since penicillin’s chemistry was not yet known. Early solutions had four or five Oxford units per milligram. Later, highly pure penicillin reached 2,000 Oxford units per milligram.
The team found that Penicillium extract killed several bacteria. Gardner and Orr-Ewing tested it on gonococci (where it was most effective), meningococci, streptococci, staphylococci, anthrax bacteria, Actinomyces, and bacteria causing tetanus and gangrene. Florey and Jennings tested penicillin on rats, mice, rabbits, and cats using different methods. They found no signs of toxicity. On 25 May 1940, Florey injected eight mice with a virulent streptococcus strain and gave four penicillin. The next day, all untreated mice died, but the treated ones survived, though one died later. Over the next weeks, Jennings and Florey repeated the experiment with more mice and other bacteria. They found penicillin worked on staphylococci and gangrene-causing bacteria. They published their results in The Lancet on 24 August 1940. Florey reminded his team that humans weigh 3,000 times more than mice.
In February 1941, Florey and Chain treated their first patient, Albert Alexander, who had a mouth sore that spread into a severe facial infection involving streptococci and staphylococci. His face, eyes, and scalp swelled so much that an eye was removed to relieve pain. After receiving penicillin, he began to recover. However, the researchers did not have enough penicillin to save him, and he relapsed and died. Because of this and the difficulty in producing enough penicillin, Florey focused on treating children, who needed smaller doses.
Florey expected penicillin to be seen as a major breakthrough, but it caused little interest. He spent two years trying to gain attention for what he believed was the most important medical discovery of the century. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in March 1941, but his penicillin work had little to do with this.
As the war worsened with German air raids on the UK, Florey and Ethel sent their children to a safer country in July 1940. The United States was not yet at war, and John Fulton, the Sterling Professor of Physiology at Yale University, and his wife Lucia agreed to care for them in New Haven, Connecticut, "for the duration." In April 1941, the Rockefeller Foundation’s Warren Weaver met with Florey and discussed the challenge of making enough penicillin for clinical trials. Weaver arranged for the foundation to fund a three-month visit to the United States for Florey and a colleague to explore producing penicillin there.
Since Florey wanted to convince a company to make penicillin, and Heatley knew the most about production, he chose to take Heatley with him. He did not tell Chain until the morning of their departure.
Later life
After the war ended, Florey led his team at the Sir William Dunn School in studying antibiotic substances made by plants and microorganisms. They examined claviformin, proactinomycin, helvolic acid, mycophenolic acid, hirsutic acid, bacitracin, and micrococcin. In 1949, they published Antibiotics: A Survey of Penicillin, Streptomycin, and Other Antimicrobial Substances from Fungi, Actinomycetes, Bacteria and Plants, a large two-volume book. Florey also edited Lectures on General Pathology, which was published in 1954. Chain left in 1948, but Guy Newton joined the team as its biochemist. Funding came from the Medical Research Council, the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation, and American pharmaceutical companies.
In September 1953, Newton and Abraham isolated crystalline cephalosporin C from a fungus first found by Giuseppe Brotzu in Sardinia. They discovered it had antibiotic properties. At first, they thought its antibiotic activity was weak, so Abraham wrote to Florey, who was in Australia, asking if research should continue. Florey believed the work was important and told them to keep going. They found that cephalosporin C was resistant to penicillinase produced by gram-positive bacteria. When Florey returned to Oxford, he and Jennings tested it and found it was not toxic to mice but could protect them from streptococci and penicillinase-producing staphylococci. The Oxford team studied the chemical structure of cephalosporin C, which led to the creation of semisynthetic cephalosporins by changing their side chains, similar to how semisynthetic penicillins were made. "Everyone I asked who worked on cephalosporin C," science writer David Wilson said, "said one person kept the project going: Florey."
Disputes about British companies paying fees to American ones for using deep water methods to make penicillin, even though penicillin was seen as a British innovation, led to the creation of the National Research Development Corporation (NRDC) in June 1948. The Oxford team patented their work on cephalosporins and gave the patents to the NRDC. By 1978, global sales of cephalosporins reached over £600,000 (equivalent to £3,279,000 in 2025), and the NRDC earned £100,000 (equivalent to £546,000 in 2025) in yearly royalties. Florey received 0.5% of these royalties in the last two years of his life.
In the original plan for Canberra, architect Walter Burley Griffin included space for a university at the base of Black Mountain, where it would eventually be built. Sir David Rivett led a committee to study the proposed medical research institute, its cost, and its impact on other institutions. Florey sent Rivett a 19-page proposal on April 7, 1945. He suggested creating a funding body in Australia similar to the UK’s Medical Research Council. The institute would be led by a director and have about 100 staff, costing roughly £100,000 (equivalent to £3,732,000 in 2025). Florey underestimated the building cost, estimating £240,000 (equivalent to £8,956,000 in 2025) for a building for 60 researchers, but the final cost was nearly four times higher.
The Australian National University Act received royal approval on August 1, 1946. It created the Australian National University (ANU) and named the medical research institute the "John Curtin School of Medical Research." Economist H. C. "Nugget" Coombs, head of the Department of Post-War Reconstruction, traveled to the UK with Prime Minister Ben Chifley in 1946. Coombs met Florey in Oxford and agreed that the university’s success depended on attracting top scholars. They invited Florey to lead medicine, Mark Oliphant for physics, Keith Hancock for history, and Raymond William Firth for Pacific studies. Each was offered a position in April 1947 and asked to consult in December 1947 and January 1948. They would serve on an academic advisory committee, earning £250 (equivalent to A$20,242 in 2022) plus £200 (equivalent to A$16,193 in 2022) in expenses yearly. A London office was opened to help with communication.
Florey did not move to Canberra but accepted the role of acting director of the John Curtin School of Medical Research for five years starting in May 1948. Brian Lewis was the university architect, but Florey hired Stephen Welsh, a professor from Sheffield University. Building a scientific facility with five laboratories and advanced equipment like biosafety cabinets, cold rooms, sterilizers, and incubators was expensive and difficult in a remote location like Canberra. Much of the equipment had to be bought with scarce US dollars.
The Cabinet approved a 50,000-square-foot (4,600 m²) building at £3 per square foot in 1947 (equivalent to A$229 in 2022), but Florey and Sanders designed a larger 235,000-square-foot (21,800 m²) building at £4 per square foot (equivalent to A$306 in 2022). In 1950, the Cabinet approved £810,000 (equivalent to A$47,137,000 in 2022) for the building and £200,000 (equivalent to A$11,639,000 in 2022) for equipment. Florey had freedom to hire professors and recruited Hugh Ennor (biochemistry), Adrien Albert (medical chemistry), and Frank Fenner (microbiology). A. F. Bunker became the laboratory manager and helped prepare the building.
Florey visited Canberra in March 1953 but refused to continue as acting director or take the director role, though he agreed to stay as an advisor. He was pessimistic about the project, telling Jennings it would be a "miracle" if the university had a real academic atmosphere. The project faced challenges, as some Cabinet members opposed it, disliking its name and its status as a "school" instead of a full university. Changing the name required amending the law, which did not happen. In November 1953, Florey was told construction would proceed as planned
Honours and awards
Florey received the Cameron Prize for Therapeutics from the University of Edinburgh and the Lister Medal in 1945 for his work in surgical science. The Lister Oration, delivered at the Royal College of Surgeons of England that same year, was titled "Use of Micro-organisms for Therapeutic Purposes." He was honored with many honorary degrees from universities in Britain and other countries, including the University of São Paulo in Brazil. In 1947, he was awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Society of Medicine. In 1946, he became a commander of the French Legion of Honour. He received the American Medal for Merit in 1948 and the James Smithson Medal in 1965.
In 1963, Florey was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. The following year, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1961, he became an honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons.
On February 4, 1965, Florey was named a life peer and became Baron Florey, of Adelaide in the Commonwealth of Australia and of Marston in the City of Oxford. This honor was greater than the knighthood given to Sir Alexander Fleming and recognized Florey’s significant role in making penicillin widely available to save millions of lives. He was officially introduced to the House of Lords in April, with support from Lord Cottesloe, Margaret Jennings’s brother, and Lord Adrian, a former president of the Royal Society. On July 15, 1965, he was appointed a member of the Order of Merit.
Death
Florey published his final scientific paper, written together with Jennings, in 1967. He had written or co-written more than two hundred papers. He passed away at his home, the provost's lodgings, due to congestive heart failure on February 21, 1968. Even though Florey was an agnostic, a funeral service was held at St. Nicholas' parish church in Marston. A memorial plaque was placed on the outside wall near the entrance of the church. The church did not allow the plaque to be placed inside because Florey had strongly expressed his lack of belief in religion. A larger ceremony was held at Westminster Abbey in London, attended by about 500 people. His body was cremated.
In 1980, Lady Hamilton Fairley, the wife of Sir Neil Hamilton Fairley, started a campaign to create a memorial for Florey in London. The Premier of South Australia, David Tonkin, agreed to supply South Australian marble for a memorial stone. A South Australian sculptor named Paul Trappe was hired to engrave the stone based on a design by John Peters. The stone, which measured 60 by 90 centimeters (24 by 35 inches), was transported to London by the Royal Australian Air Force. It was unveiled by Lady (Margaret) Florey on November 2, 1981. The inscription on the stone reads:
Posthumous honours and legacy
Florey's portrait was shown on the Australian fifty-dollar note from 1973 to 1995. The note also showed the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology, Penicillin notatum, mice used in penicillin experiments, mold that stops bacteria from growing on a Petri dish, and Heatley's assay method.
Florey Drive, a street and suburb in the Australian Capital Territory, the Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health at the University of Melbourne, Victoria, the Florey Unit of the Royal Berkshire Hospital in Reading, Berkshire, the Florey Institute for Host–Pathogen Interactions at the University of Sheffield, and a lecture theatre in the University of Adelaide's medical school are named after him. The Electoral district of Florey, a single-member electoral district for the South Australian House of Assembly, is also named after him.
It was estimated that the development of penicillin saved over 80 million lives.
In film
"Penicillin: The Magic Bullet" is a 2006 Australian film written by Gordon Glenn. It was funded by the Film Finance Corporation and Arcimedia Productions, with the help of Film Victoria. "Breaking The Mould" is a 2009 historical drama. It tells the story of how penicillin was developed in the 1930s and 1940s by a team of scientists at Oxford led by Florey at the William Dunn School of Pathology. The film features Dominic West as Florey, Denis Lawson as Fleming, and Oliver Dimsdale as Chain. It was written by Kate Brooke and directed by Peter Hoar.