A Jew who left Germany when Hitler came to power, Sir Ernst Chain was a winner, with Sir Alexander Fleming and Lord Florey, of the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine in 1945. Later he was a significant figure in the use of the semi-synthetic penicillins which, from the mid-1950s onwards, revolutionized the use of the anti-biotic in more than one field of medicine. Born in Berlin in 1906, of a Russian emigre father and a German mother, Chain left Germany for England on 30 January 1933. Working first with Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins in Cambridge, then with Professor Howard Florey in Oxford, Chain studied the biochemical processes by which bacteriolytic agents operate. Writing up his results, he studied Fleming's neglected original report of the bacteria-inhibiting properties of penicillin, and with Florey's support embarked on a major investigation of how penicillin could be made and purified.

Author Biography

Ronald Clark (1916-1987) born in London and educated at King's College School. In 1933 he chose journalism as a career. During the Second World War, after being turned down for military duty on medical grounds, he served as a war correspondent. During this time Clark landed on Juno Beach with the Canadians on D-Day and followed the war until it's end, then remained in Germany to report on the major War Crimes trials. Clark returned to Britain in 1948 and wrote extensively on subjects ranging from mountain climbing to the atomic bomb, Balmoral Castle to world explorers. He also wrote a number of biographies on a myriad of figures, such as: Charles Darwin, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, Sigmund Freud, and Bertrand Russell.