TOTAL LIVES SAVED

Norman Heatley

How fast can you count to this #?

Deprecated: Function split() is deprecated in /home/lexchess/public_html/scienceheroes.com/modules/mod_dn/helper.php on line 218

We Need Your Help!

Do You Know This Scientist?

If you do, we welcome your input. Please share your funny stories, brief anecdotes, quotes, and photos of the scientist - as well as your own inspirational opinions. Personal accounts help bring a scientist alive and create an enduring historical picture. You can be a part of this exciting history by providing your personal account!

Please click here to learn more about how to contribute:
Participate as a Friend Scholar

Can You Write or Research?

Help us learn more about this great scientist. You can be a credited Support Scholar by contributing your knowledge about this scientist and important discovery. Entries can be as short as a single section and as easy as compiling quotes. Click here to learn more about becoming a Support Scholar:
Participate as a Support Scholar

Would you like to adopt a scientist?

Endeavor to research all the sections of a scientist. Click here to learn how to be an Expert Scholar.
Participate as an Expert Scholar

Have Historically Significant Photographs?
Participate with Photos

Click here for all the ways you can participate:
Participate to ScienceHeroes.com

Testimonials

Has this scientist’s science impacted your life?
Click here to tell your story or to read others’ life changing anecdotes:
Post Your Own Testimonial

Norman Heatley
(January 10, 1911 - January 6, 2004)
Born in England
Year of Discovery: 1940
readitIntroAbove

Engineered Methods to Grow Penicillin, Crucial to Making Antibiotic Treatment Usable

Heatley joined the famous Florey research team in 1936 after receiving his PhD from Cambridge. Though a rather quiet individual, he would have a monumental impact on the development of penicillin. Heatley was the junior member of the research team but, without his contributions, it's unlikely they would have been successful. Heatley's first breakthrough was in figuring out how to remove the active penicillin from within the liquid produced by the mold culture. Once this was achieved, he faced the difficulty of producing sufficient quantities of penicillin to begin testing. Once again, Heatley used his ingenuity, utilizing every conceivable type of container from discarded glass bottles to ceramic bedpans to culture the penicillin mold. His efforts helped pave the way for the development of penicillin, credited with saving over 80 million lives.

Heatley was an insightful biochemist, whose quiet nature served him well in his collaboration with his more assertive colleagues. But, though soft-spoken, Florey and his team came to rely on Heatley's genius to solve the most complex issues. The team discovered that adding ether helped isolate the penicillin. But, it was Heatley who figured out how to then extract the active penicillin from the ether solution, by changing the pH. Heatley also directed the effort to produce sufficient quantities of penicillin to begin trials. He set up a makeshift production facility, in the midst of World War II, with few supplies readily available. When a glass manufacturer couldn't produce the culture vessels he needed, he remembered reading about the production of ceramics as a boy, and was convinced he could make a fired ceramic vessel work. He designed the vessel's dimensions and contacted a ceramics company in an English region known as The Potteries to produce them. Heatley even picked up the first batch of 174 himself, in a borrowed van, just two days before Christmas, 1940. This simple production facility produced enough penicillin to conduct the first human trials. Following their early success, Heatley accompanied Florey to the United States, where they completed the necessary arrangements to make penicillin available on a wide-scale basis. By D-Day, in June of 1944, there was enough penicillin available to treat all 40,000 soldiers injured in the Normandy invasion.

Fleming, Florey, and Chain received the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1945 for the discovery of penicillin - there was no mention of the critical contributions that Heatley had made. But, in 1991, almost 50 years later, Oxford University finally recognized the significance of Heatley's work. Oxford awarded Heatley an honorary doctorate of medicine - one of only two such doctorates awarded to non-medical people in the university's 900-year history.

readitIntroBelow