[3][4][5][6] Born in Hassfurt, northern Bavaria, the first of the three children of Max Neuberger (1877–1931), cloth merchant and businessman, and Bertha, née Hiller (1888–1974), both religious Jews.

[7] He studied medicine at the University of Würzburg where he was awarded a summa cum laude medical degree.

Chain shared the 1945 Nobel prize with Alexander Fleming and Howard Florey for their work on penicillin.

Neuberger foresaw Hitler's persecution of the Jews after he came to power in 1933, and, as with numerous other Jewish intellectuals (including Chain), he fled to London.

At the start of the Second World War he moved to the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Cambridge where he took on Fred Sanger as his PhD student.