Howard Walter Florey was born on Sept. 24, 1898 in Australia. His father, Joseph, had left England to seek out a warmer climate for his tuberculosis-stricken wife. Unfortunately, she died of the disease and Joseph remarried. Howard was the couple's third and final child.

Perhaps influenced by the death of his father's first wife, Howard studied infectious disease in his native Adelaide before becoming a Rhodes scholar and enrolling in Oxford in 1921. In 1926, he received a fellowship and PhD from Cambridge.

Florey would make many contributions to the field of experimental pathology. But he's best known for his work with penicillin. Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin and its therapeutic properties in 1928. But it was Florey and his colleagues who would find a way to turn the substance into a drug.

The problem was how to isolate the active substance in penicillin from the mold in which it grows. In 1939, a team of British scientists led by Florey found a way to extract a liquid penicillin broth that could be manufactured into a drug. It was a breakthrough in the field of antibiotics. By the end of the Second World War in 1945, the Allies were mass producing the penicillin drug.

Florey and his colleagues won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1945. Florey had been knighted the year before and would be made Baron Florey, a life peer of the Commonwealth of Australia in 1965. Florey is still considered one of Australia's greatest scientists-although his portrait no longer graces the $50 note.

Florey died of a heart attack on Feb. 21, 1968.

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