1945 Howard Florey, Alexander Fleming and Ernst Chain are awarded the Nobel Prize “for the discovery of penicillin and its curative effect in various infectious diseases.” Florey and Chain discovered how to isolate and concentrate the germ-killing agent in penicillin in 1939 based on Flemings work nine years earlier.
But it was the young and ingenious Heatley who invented a way to purify penicillin.
