At the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology, Florey gathered Ernst Chain, Norman Heatley and a small Oxford team around a fragile antibacterial substance that had lain dormant since Fleming's 1929 paper.
His achievement was not the first sighting of penicillin but its translation: extracting it, measuring it, proving it in animals and patients, and carrying it across the Atlantic until wartime industry could make it ordinary.