The German-born biochemist who became a key member of Florey’s Oxford penicillin team was Ernst Chain.
Ernst Boris Chain was born in Berlin in 1906 and later emigrated to Britain after the rise of Nazism. At the University of Oxford’s Sir William Dunn School of Pathology, he drew Howard Florey’s attention to Alexander Fleming’s largely neglected 1929 paper on penicillin.
Chain worked with Florey and colleagues including Norman Heatley, Edward Abraham, Arthur Gardner and Margaret Jennings. He helped devise extraction and purification methods, including freeze-drying, which produced a more stable brown powder for testing. The Oxford group then demonstrated penicillin’s therapeutic potential in animals and early human cases.
The other names are associated with the project but do not fit the clue. Heatley was an English biochemist and laboratory specialist, Abraham was a British biochemist, and Gardner was a British bacteriologist. Chain, Florey and Fleming shared the 1945 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.