Ernst Chain

Ernst Boris Chain was born in Berlin on 19 June 1906. A biochemist by training, he fled Germany for Britain as the Nazi threat rose. Working with Howard Florey at Oxford, Chain took Alexander Fleming's 1928 observation—a mold that killed bacteria in a petri dish—and made it matter. He found a way to purify and produce penicillin in quantities that could actually treat infection. The work arrived in time for the Second World War, saving countless soldiers from wounds that would have killed them a decade earlier. In 1945, Chain, Florey, and Fleming shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicin…