Research at Cambridge and Oxford

1934-1977

1 file

This Section documents Chain's early research at Cambridge and Oxford on lecithin and snake venom, and the work in Oxford in penicillin which led to the award of the Nobel Prize with Fleming and Florey in 1945.

It will be obvious from the above list of contents that very little actual research material has survived from this period. There are no notebooks, few records of experiments (with the possible exception of B.1) and even the scientific correspondence is very sparse for the 1930s and consists of Chain's carbons only for the duration of the Second World War. B.15ff contains a few documents relating to the early penicillin work, in particular the draft for the grant application to the Rockefeller Foundation submitted by Florey in 1939 (see also B.107), but most of the information about this period is to be found in the historical accounts and correspondence at B.61-B.112.

See C.4-C.9 for carbon copies of 1948 correspondence including some references to penicillin