Few people may recognize the name Norman Heatley. Even the Nobel Committee overlooked him when, in 1945, it awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine jointly to Alexander Fleming of St. Mary’s Hospital and Ernst Chain and Howard Florey of Oxford University for discovering the lifesaving antibiotic penicillin. But it was Heatley, working side by side with Chain and Florey, who devised the first methods for growing enough penicillin to study its chemical structure and activity, purifying it, and measuring its potency. Sir Henry Harris, who succeeded Florey as head of Oxford’s Dunn School of Pathology, once summed up Heatley’s role by saying, “Without Fleming, no Chain or Florey; without Florey, no Heatley; without Heatley, no penicillin.”
