The Medical School has a proud HOWARD FLOREY place in the history of the Professor of Pathology at Howard discovery of penicillin – “the most Sheffield, 1932–35 efficacious life-saving drug in the world”, which made possible Nobel Laureate Florey, the treatment of a wide range (Medicine/Physiology) of previously untreatable for demonstrating the Baron Florey bacterial infections. therapeutic potential of (1898–1968) penicillin Howard Florey. This photo dates from CECIL GEORGE PAINE when he was a member of the Medical School’s staff. Treated eye infections & Dr Cecil with a penicillin preparation in 1930 George Paine The first documented case of the therapeutic (1905–94) use of penicillin

DID YOU KNOW ? The Medical School had

Cecil George Paine. This photo was two future Nobel Prize taken in the mid 1930s. The power of penicillin to kill bacteria was first observed in 1928 by Alexander Fleming, winners on its staff in the who published his results but was unable to purify the antibiotic for medical use. He provided a culture of his penicillin-producing isolate of Penicillium notatum to 1930s – Howard Florey Cecil George Paine , who had qualified as a doctor at St Mary’s Hospital Medical School in London where Fleming worked. In 1929, Paine moved to Sheffield as Assistant Pathologist and Hans Krebs. at the Royal Infirmary and Lecturer in Pathology at the University. He used a crude filtrate produced by Fleming’s mould to successfully treat eye infections in 1929–30. Shortly afterwards he left the Infirmary, abandoning his experiments with penicillin while concentrating on puerperal sepsis in his new post as Consultant Pathologist at Paine’s case notes, of 28 August 1930, Sheffield’s Jessop Hospital (1931–70). He did, however, mention his findings to Fleming which show his use of ‘pinicillin’ at the and to Howard Florey, then Professor of Pathology at the Sheffield Medical School. foot of the first page. Florey went on, with a team at Oxford, to purify penicillin; doubtless Paine’s work helped convince him of its medical potential.

Howard Florey qualified as a doctor in Australia in 1921. Awarded a Rhodes Scholarship, he worked his passage as a ship’s surgeon to England. After a short period at Oxford, he became a lecturer in the Pathology Department at Cambridge in 1927. Five years later, he was appointed Joseph Hunter Professor of Pathology at Sheffield. Here he showed that curare controls tetanus spasms and worked on the bacteriolytic agent lysozyme, another of Fleming’s discoveries, but this work languished for want of a biochemist’s input. Ironically, he left Sheffield just before the supremely talented biochemist Hans Krebs arrived.

THIS BOARD IS PART OF THE MEDICAL SCHOOL HERITAGE Howard Florey returned to Oxford as Chair in the Department of Pathology in 1935 and PROJECT 2012. here his team, which included Ernst Chain, purified penicillin. On 25 May 1940, they Scan the QR code for further infected eight mice with virulent Streptococci and treated four with injections of crude details on the Faculty web pages. penicillin. All the treated mice survived, while the untreated died within hours. Further experiments demonstrated the amazing therapeutic potential of penicillin. Fleming, Florey and Chain were awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine/Physiology in 1945, and Florey received many other honours, including the Order of Merit and an honorary degree (DSc) from the University of Sheffield. He was ennobled in 1965. The contribution of Cecil George Paine to the use of penicillin was largely overlooked until 1986, when he was interviewed by Dr Milton Wainwright (Department of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology), and Dr Harold Swan (Medical School) found  case notes relating to his work. Together, Wainwright and Swan reconstructed the story of how Paine used crude penicillin filtrates to successfully treat eye infections (ophthalmia neonatorum) in two babies. These case notes provide evidence of the See also: world’s first authenticated therapeutic use of penicillin. Paine was subsequently Timeline: B floor awarded an honorary degree (MD) by the University in 1987. entrance