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Person

Norman Heatley

A man with gray hair and glasses, wearing a brown suit and a patterned tie, stands in front of a bookshelf.

English biochemist, born 1911, who joined the Oxford penicillin team in 1936. The least famous of the principals — overlooked for the 1945 Nobel, never elected to the Royal Society until 1990 — he was arguably the most indispensable. He devised the back-extraction method that recovered penicillin from broth, built the apparatus from milk-bottle cultures, and ran the assay that measured potency. Oxford gave him an honorary medical degree in 1990, the first in its 800-year history.

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