Episode 37. Norman Heatley and Penicillin

SYNOPSIS

Summarizing the rediscovery and application of penicillin during the Second World War, Sir Henry Harris, the Head of the Dunn School of Pathology at Oxford University, stated In 1999: "Without Fleming, no Chain; without Chain, no Florey; without Florey, no Heatley; without Heatley, no penicillin”.

The gifted team that the Oxford Professor of Pathology, Howard Florey built around himself at the Dunn School during the late 1930s picked up and re-investigated the earlier, paused discovery of penicillin in some stray mould on a dish of bacteria in Alexander Fleming’s London laboratory in 1928. 

A no-nonsense Australian outsider, Florey believed that any advances in bacteriology depended on equal advances in biochemistry, so added the brilliant German emigre and biochemist, Ernst Chain, to his team.  But the exploitation of an unstable wonder drug like penicillin needed a lab genius.  This role was filled by a young master of the practical skills that were essential for developing the micro-methods for assaying penicillin: Norman Heatley. 

The interview covers the domestic life of Norman Heatley and his wife, Mercy, a Kleinian psychotherapist, their children, a family tragedy; and Oxford supper parties, that included the novelist Iris Murdoch and her husband, the literary critic, John Bayley.  The fate of hundreds of the famous ceramic “bedpans’ for penicillin, fashioned in the Potteries by J. Macintyre and Company, is discussed.  So is the generous spirit but limited culinary ability of Norman Heatley, who made a homemade apple pie to welcome his new neighbour, Raymond Blanc, the renowned restaurateur.     

GUEST

Dr Jonathan Heatley is a retired general practitioner in Horsham, West Sussex and the son of Norman Heatley. Jonathan is the third Heatley generation to demonstrate the practical skills in veterinary surgery and clinical medicine that derive from a tradition of scientific training in the public and medical schools.  He grew up in post-war Oxford, so is ideally placed to describe the social milieu of his parents and the university world of Norman Heatley.

Although the 1945 Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine was awarded to Alexander Fleming, Howard Florey and Ernst Chain for their work on penicillin, the indispensable importance of Norman Heatley to the extraction and purification of penicillin during its clinical trials has become better known from the 2000s. This process has been helped considerably by the publication in 2004 of the book by Eric Lax, The Mould in Dr Florey’s Coat.

Jonathan’s interview with Simon Machin was recorded at Jonathan Heatley’s home in Horsham on 11 September 2023.