High Street, Tonbridge,
Kent, TN9 1JP
Norman Heatley entered Tonbridge in Michaelmas Term 1924 as a boarder in Parkside. An early interest in science was allowed to flourish at Tonbridge and he won a Rowe memorial scholarship on leaving Tonbridge for St. John’s College, Cambridge in 1929. After graduating with an upper second he stayed on at Cambridge to do research for a PhD in biochemistry. In 1936 he moved to Oxford to work with Ernst Chain and Howard Florey in the School of Pathology where he spent the rest of his working life.
Alexander Fleming had discovered penicillin by accident in 1928 but not until 1938 was serious research resumed at Oxford. Heatley played a vital role in this research by inventing a means by which the penicillin could be extracted and purified from the culture fluid and its activity measured. He played a key role with Florey in the first successful experiments on mice in 1940. In early 1941 the first human patients were treated and the results published in ‘The Lancet’ in August 1941. Florey and Heatley then flew to America to organize mass production of the new wonder drug, which had begun by late 1943 and which saved countless lives of servicemen in the remaining years of the war.
As a result of this work Lord Nuffield endowed three research fellowships at Lincoln College, Oxford and Heatley was elected to one of these. After his work on penicillin the rest of his life might have been an anti-climax but he remained at Oxford working on the drug and on other scientific collaborations which resulted in more than sixty scientific papers which he wrote or co-wrote.
Heatley is often regarded as the unsung hero of the discovery of penicillin and he received just one honorary degree, from Oxford, compared with one hundred and eighty honorary degrees which Fleming received. He was also appointed OBE in 1978. He was a kind and considerate person, a team player who could be justly proud of his crucial role in the invention of the first practical antibiotic, which saved so many lives in the war and has continued to do with millions of patients ever since.