Howard Florey Quotes

The problem of chemotherapy of bacterial infections could be solved neither by the experimental medical research worker nor by the chemist alone, but only by the two together working in very close cooperation over many years.

The United States has an active pharmaceutical industry that has brought huge benefits to the U.S. public. Most Americans, who benefit from these advances, have little understanding of how difficult it is to create an important new medical therapy and make it available to improve public health.

All I ever promised was that I was sure I could develop a new pharmacological agent which might answer a physiological question. Any utility would be implicit in that answer.

In contrast to how tech firms want to disrupt and break things - developing drugs must be incremental and step-by-step. This is the kind of work that involves people putting their lives on the line every day with clinical trials.

I keep encouraging the pharmaceutical companies to put more money into R&D.

I'd like to focus on my life on creating new medicines for people who are suffering from rare disease.

Pharmacology is benefited by the prepared mind. You need to know what you are looking for.

Drug discovery is terribly expensive, just to find out how one drug could or could not work and all its side effects.

I want to make a drug. I want the science to be more than imaginary, where I think, 'We're learning these fundamental principles, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.' I think we are doing that, but I want to do something really practical. I want to actually, in my lifetime, help people.

If we can actually decrease the failure rate from nine out of 10 drugs failing in clinical trials and instead have seven out of 10 instead failing, that is a major victory for drug discovery and for people having better therapy.

Best and I worked in the sub-basement of the old medical building day and night. Time, meals, sleep - all were of secondary consideration. We had to get insulin into a form that was refined enough for continued clinical use.

If we can validate our scientific bets in the clinic, if we can bring valuable new treatments to patients that need them, that will be our ultimate measure of success.

To start with, pharma was an industry based on innovation, drug discovery.

There's always going to be the need for new medications, better medications.

Throughout my career, as both a physician and a scientist, I have drawn inspiration from Merck's unwavering commitment to scientific excellence. Over time, this commitment has brought forth an unparalleled number of breakthrough medicines and vaccines that improve the lives of patients around the world.

No matter how counter-intuitive it may seem, basic research has proven over and over to be the lifeline of practical advances in medicine.

Stem cell research can revolutionize medicine, more than anything since antibiotics.

Now, what tends to happen is that the stories get hyped. And the medicines are not quite as revolutionary and as dramatic as they seem to be. But, certainly, various phases of this problem are being attacked by the pharmaceutical companies.

In general, drug companies are reasonably good at developing new treatments, and there's also a lot of good in the industry.

I think that in the 21st century, medical biology will advance at a more rapid pace than before.

The discovery of streptomycin as a product of a rather obscure group of microorganisms, the actinomycetes, led to the study of these organisms as potential producers of other chemotherapeutic substances.

Analytical pharmacology has got an important and exciting future.

Originally, in the early eighties, the drug hypothesis was among the first which occurred to scientists.

Paradoxically, no such embargo exists for the drugs and therapies that have revolutionized the treatment of serious diseases although many of them were created with the same technologies.

To develop drugs for people, we basically dismantle the system. In the lab, we look at things the size of a cell or two. We dismantle life into very small models.