• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

Penicillin pioneer dies at age 92 -- Heatley worked on making landmark drug at Peoria lab

Posted on: Friday, 23 January 2004, 06:00 CST

PEORIA - The man who, while here in Peoria, helped discover a way to mass-produce penicillin, was fondly remembered Friday by two of his former colleagues.

Dr. Norman Heatley died Monday in Oxford, England, at age 92.

"I admired his work and was able to give a few lectures with him," said Grant St. Julian, 72, who arrived at Peoria's National Center for Agricultural Utilization Research a year after Heatley left.

"He had just left when I arrived at the lab, but I was well aware of his contributions to science," St. Julian said.

Those contributions include his work on penicillin, the first antibiotic successfully used to treat bacterial infections.

Heatley was the last surviving member of a team of Oxford scientists - including the man who discovered penicillin, Alexander Fleming - who won the Nobel Prize for their work.

Fleming, a Canadian working in a laboratory at St. Mary's Hospital in England in 1928, noticed a bacteria culture had been contaminated by an airborne mold, which killed the surrounding bacteria.

He identified the mold, which had a green-blue hue like that on old bread, as penicillin notatem. He then published a paper on his findings. But it was here at Peoria's ag lab that penicillin became more than just an experiment.

Heatley was part of an ag lab team that worked on the purification and extraction of sufficient quantities of penicillin to perform the first clinical trials in 1941.

Without Heatley's work, it is unlikely the

commercial potential of penicillin would ever have been realized. Heatley and five other biochemists here invented a new extraction process to get the mold without destroying it.

Heatley and the Oxford team announced penicillin as an antibiotic in 1940. Their paper had six authors, listed in alphabetical order. Heatley was the fourth.

Bernard Hofreiter, 79, a retired ag lab chemist, remembers meeting Heatley by chance in Oxford during World War II.

"I was on leave as an Army Air Corps serviceman. I had a chance encounter with Dr. Heatley; he showed me to the place where I was planning to spend my leave," Hofreiter said.

"I had already been interested in science and pursuing a career in it," said Hofretier, who studied chemistry at Bradley University before getting a job at the ag lab. "Dr. Heatley did give me a great amount of information on chemistry when he later invited me to a tea at his Oxford home."

Hofreiter says he cherishes a letter sent by Heatley in the mid- 1980s memorializing their World War II encounter in England.

"Dr. Heatley sent the letter because he wanted to acknowledge that he remembered our meetings," Hofreiter said.

More News in this Category