You may be arriving back to Cambridge to find the usually busy coffee spot in Harvey Court, by Sidgwick Site, rechristened as Florey Café. Whilst distinctly botanical sounding, fitting for the café’s garden surrounds, the name is in fact that of Caius alumnus and Australian pathologist Howard Walter Florey, who made a major contribution to modern medicine: the therapeutic use of the antibiotic penicillin.

It won him the Nobel Prize in 1945, shared with Ernst Chain and Sir Alexander Fleming. Relative to that latter glorified name, Florey has remained obscure in all but his country of origin. The naming of the café may spark a local revitalisation of the public’s awareness of this oft-overlooked figure, and those that dig deeper will find we owe it to more than just three men for penicillin. 

“Florey made the decision to try and extract penicillin in useful quantities”

The name popularly attached to the discovery of penicillin, and antibiotics in general, is Flemming, who in 1928 observed that the accidental growth of the mould Penicillium rubens in one of his Petri dishes was inhibiting the growth of certain bacteria. Despite his eventual fame, he was not an instant celebrity. Fleming had no way to produce penicillin in quantities sufficient to demonstrate medical usefulness. In fact, after presenting a paper to the London Medical Research Club in 1929, the discovery was ignored by attendees.

Ten years later, Chain, a biochemist in Florey’s group in Oxford, suggested revisiting Fleming’s forgotten work. Florey made the fateful decision to task his lab with developing a method to extract penicillin in potentially useful quantities. He managed the team and played the essential – rather than romantic – role of  to lobby for funding, while Chain developed the techniques to draw off penicillin from continuing the mould via a solvent.

Having illuminated the role of Florey and Chain, why should we stop at three, the limit to the number of individuals that can share in a Nobel Prize? Important contributions also came from Norman Heatley, who, inspired by a bedpan, improvised the vessels in which the mould was grown, and worked out how to remove penicillin from the solvent. Also involved was Jim Kent, who, together with Florey, performed an experiment on mice that demonstrated the efficacy of the refined penicillin.

“Cambridge University can claim to be the incubator in which Florey’s crack team spawned”

One thing common to Chain, Heatley and Kent is that they all joined Florey after having worked in his former group in Cambridge. This university, then, might claim to be the incubator in which Florey’s crack team spawned, despite the development of the drug traditionally being seen as an Oxford success story.

Other members of Florey’s group include Duncan Gardner, Margaret Jennings, Jean Orr-Ewing, Gordon Sanders and his wife Ethel Florey. Also present was Edward Abraham, who, together with Chain, hypothesised a structure for the penicillin molecule that was later confirmed by Dorothy Hodgkin’s group.

The many individuals named above are a selection of those fortunate enough to have had their role in the story preserved for posterity, their contributions brought to light in the aftermath with them being assigned authorship of publications, or through potentially fallible testimony. It goes without saying there are other individuals, for reasons that may include prejudice or workplace politics, whose contributions are not on the historical record. One just has to think of Jocelyn Bell Burnell – she was a young PhD student at New Hall (now Murray Edwards), when she noticed the anomalies in observations from the radio telescope she helped build, that eventually led to the discovery of pulsars. Notoriously, the Nobel for the discovery was awarded in 1974 to two Cambridge academics Sir Martin Ryle, and Bell’s PhD supervisor Anthony Hewish, who had pioneered the observational astronomy behind the detection, with Bell left off the citation.

“Dealing out accolades according to a rigid framework is an outdated practice”

Today, there are vastly more scientists than in the early twentieth century (to illustrate, it is thought there were merely around 850 physicists in the year 1900). Not only is more being published, but increasing interconnectedness means more discoveries are made in parallel. It stands that it is increasingly difficult to sift through the great mass of work being done, and to pin down individuals to credit for advancements.

Dealing out accolades according to a rigid framework that only highlights three individuals like the scientific Nobels do, is surely an outdated practice (the Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to organisations throughout its history). How we reconcile on one hand society’s preference for stories with archetypal heroes, and on the other, the twenty-first century reality, may decide how future generations view scientific endeavour. Many of us count ‘great’ scientists among our heroes but if the stories we tell do not reflect reality, it is bound to lead to disenchantment.

As a Caius alumnus and an important figure worthy of celebration, Florey is an appropriate namesake for a café on the college grounds, and the naming an invitation to take a more nuanced approach to how we celebrate scientific advancement.