[27] On 11 December 1921, Florey embarked for England from Port Adelaide on the SS Otira, an ocean liner of the Shaw, Savill & Albion Line, travelling for free as the ship's surgeon.

[43] The sudden death of British pathologist Thomas Strangeways on 23 December 1926 created a vacancy in the Huddersfield Lectureship in Special Pathology at Cambridge,[47] and it was offered to Florey.

Nonetheless, during the summer break in 1929, she accompanied Florey to Spain, where Sherrington had arranged for him to study methods of nerve staining under Santiago Ramón y Cajal.

[55][56] Two years later they spent the summer with the French histologist and endocrinologist Pol Bouin at the University of Strasbourg, where Florey studied mucinogen, the chemical precursor to mucin.

[62] The death of James Sholto Cameron Douglas on 30 October 1931 created a vacancy in the Joseph Hunter chair of pathology at the University of Sheffield, and Florey decided to apply.

This caused alarm at the university, for it had recently lost two of its senior professors through the retirement of John Beresford Leathes and the departure of Edward Mellanby to become the secretary of the MRC.

The lack of a first-rate pathologist was remedied when Beatrice Pullinger joined the staff in January 1934, and she became Florey's ally in successfully lifting the standard of research and teaching in the department.

[79] He attracted Rhodes Scholars such as Australian Brian Maegraith and Americans Robert H. Ebert and Leslie Epstein to the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology;[81][82] other doctoral students included Peter Medawar, Gordon Sanders and Jean Taylor.

[87] In 1936, Florey received a letter from Hilda stating that their mother Bertha had terminal cancer, so he arranged to travel to Australia with Ethel, Paquita and Charles during the summer break.

Heatley had fallen out with Chain, and had accepted a new position at the Carlsberg Laboratory in Copenhagen on a Rockefeller Fellowship, but due to the outbreak of the Second World War, he had decided to remain at Oxford.

[97][98] As a bacteriologist, Miller was enthusiastic about the antibacterial project; he encouraged Florey to apply for a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, and recommended to his headquarters that the request for financial support be given serious consideration.

[122] In February 1941, Florey and Chain treated their first patient, Albert Alexander, who had had a small sore at the corner of his mouth, which then spread, leading to a severe facial infection involving streptococci and staphylococci.

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 at their home in New Haven, Connecticut, "for the duration".

[128] In April 1941, the Rockefeller Foundation's Warren Weaver met with Florey, and they discussed the difficulty of producing sufficient penicillin to conduct clinical trials.

On 25 September, Florey met with Sir Cecil McAlpine Weir, the Director-General of Equipment and Stores at the Ministry of Supply, who promised overriding priority for the mass production of penicillin.

His recommendations were acted upon, and the War Office established a training course for pathologists and clinicians at the Royal Herbert Hospital, which made use of film that Florey shot in North Africa.

In 1943, the War Cabinet had agreed to produce penicillin in Australia, and Colonel E. V. (Bill) Keogh, the Army's Director of Hygiene and Pathology, detailed Captain Percival Bazeley and Lieutenant H. H. Kretchmar to establish a production facility.

When the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation asked if it could reward him, as it had the staff at Peoria, he arranged for a commemorative rose garden with a memorial stone honouring Abraham, Chain, Fletcher, himself, Ethel Florey, Gardner, Jennings, Orr-Ewing and Sanders.

[168] After the war ended, Florey directed his team at the Sir William Dunn School in the investigation of antibiotic substances produced by plants and microorganisms.

[174] In the original design of the city of Canberra, the architect, Walter Burley Griffin had provided for a university, and had set aside land for it at the base of Black Mountain, where it would ultimately be built.

[178] H. C. "Nugget" Coombs, an economist and head of the Department of Post-War Reconstruction, accompanied the Prime Minister, Ben Chifley, on an official visit to the UK as his principal advisor.

They agreed that the success of the new university would depend on the quality of faculty they could attract, and he wanted four eminent scholars to lead the four research schools: Florey for medicine, Mark Oliphant for physics, Keith Hancock for history, and Raymond William Firth for Pacific studies.

[179][180] Florey never moved to Canberra, but he did accept the position of acting director of the John Curtin School of Medical Research for a five-year term commencing in May 1948 in order to establish it.

[187] By this time the project was in jeopardy; while the prime minister, Robert Menzies, supported it, a faction in the Cabinet led by Richard Casey and Wilfrid Kent Hughes did not; they were chagrined that it was named after a man they despised, and that it called itself a school when it would not train doctors.

[188] On 27 March 1958, Florey ceremoniously opened the John Curtin School of Medical Research and received an honorary Doctor of Science degree along with Sir Norman Gregg.

[195] In December 1960, Florey was informed that plans to build new accommodation for the Foreign Office at Carlton House Terrace had fallen though and that the Crown Estate Commissioners had suggested that the premises might be suitable for the headquarters of cultural bodies.

Aware of the acute danger of overpopulation that the life-saving drugs that he had pioneered could cause, he established a population study group, and in 1967, he became the president of the Family Planning Association.

[225] This was a higher honour than the knighthood awarded to Sir Alexander Fleming, and it recognised the monumental work Florey had done in making penicillin available in sufficient quantities to save millions of lives.

[246] Breaking The Mould is a 2009 historical drama that tells the story of the development of penicillin in the 1930s and 1940s, by the group of scientists at Oxford headed by Florey at the William Dunn School of Pathology.

The film stars Dominic West as Florey, Denis Lawson as Fleming, and Oliver Dimsdale as Chain; and was written by Kate Brooke and directed by Peter Hoar.