Howard Walter (1898-1968) was born in Malvern, Adelaide.
After graduating MB BS 1921 from the University of Adelaide he sailed for England as a Rhodes scholar.
He studied under Sir Charles Sherrington at the University of Oxford then transferred to Cambridge to complete his doctoral thesis.
In 1935 he was appointed professor at the Sir William Dunn school of pathology at Oxford . It was here he made his greatest contribution to science : the development of penicillin.
He was assisted in this work by Ernst Chain and Norman Heatley.Florey was knighted in 1944, won ( with Chain and Fleming) the Nobel prize for physiology and medicine in 1945 and received many other awards.
In 1965 he was created Baron Florey of Adelaide and Marston. When he died in 1968 his estate was sworn for probate at thirty thousand pounds. He had made no fortune from his work for in his time ethical medical principles forbade the patenting of penicillin.
When told of the immense value of his work to relieve the suffering of mankind, work that saw the inauguration of the antibiotic era, Florey said that the project was originally driven by scientific interests, and that the medicinal discovery was a bonus.