Editing Howard Florey (section)

===North American supply===
As the war intensified with German air raids on the UK, Florey and Ethel decided to send their children away to a safer country in July 1940. The United States was not yet at war, and [[John Farquhar Fulton|John Fulton]], the [[Sterling Professor]] of [[Physiology]] at [[Yale University]], and his wife Lucia agreed to care for them at their home in [[New Haven, Connecticut]], "for the duration".{{sfn|Macfarlane|1979|pp=320–321}} In April 1941, the Rockefeller Foundation's [[Warren Weaver]] met with Florey, and they discussed the difficulty of producing sufficient penicillin to conduct clinical trials. Weaver arranged for the foundation to fund a three-month visit to the United States for Florey and a colleague so they could explore the possibility of the production of penicillin there.{{sfn|Williams|1984|pp=125–128}}

Since his aim was to persuade a firm to manufacture penicillin, and Heatley knew the most about penicillin production, Florey chose to take Heatley with him, and did not tell Chain until the morning of their departure. Chain, who saw penicillin as a joint project between himself and Florey, with Heatley as a laboratory technician, was greatly offended.{{sfn|Mason|2022|pp=196–197}}  Chain later wrote: "I left the room silently but shattered by the experience of this underhand trick and act of bad faith, the worst so far in my experience of Florey. It spoiled my initially good relations with this man for ever."{{sfn|Clark|1985|p=68}}

Florey and Heatley left for the United States by air on 27 June 1941. In New Haven Florey met Fulton and was reunited with his children. Fulton introduced him to [[Ross Granville Harrison|Ross Harrison]], the Chairman of the [[National Research Council (United States)|National Research Council]], and Harrison introduced him to [[Charles Thom]], the chief [[mycologist]] at the [[Bureau of Plant Industry (United States)|Bureau of Plant Industry]] of the [[United States Department of Agriculture]] (USDA), and the man who had identified the mould reported by Fleming. Thom took them to [[Washington, D.C.]], to see Percy Wells, the acting head of the USDA's four laboratories, and Wells sent them to Orville May, the director of the UDSA's [[Northern Regional Research Laboratory]] (NRRL) in [[Peoria, Illinois]]. May arranged for them to meet with Robert D. Coghill, the chief of the NRRL's [[industrial fermentation|fermentation]] division, who raised the possibility that fermentation in large vessels (deep submergence) might be the key to large-scale production.{{sfn|Williams|1984|pp=130–134}}<ref>{{cite journal |title=Some Aspects of the Early History of Penicillin in the United States |first=Percy A. |last=Wells |journal=Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences |issn=0043-0439 |volume=65 |issue=3 |date=September 1975 |pages=96–101 |jstor=24536802 }}</ref>

On 17 August, Florey met with Richards, who had become the chairman of the Medical Research Committee of the [[Office of Scientific Research and Development]], who promised his support. Florey returned to Oxford in September without undertakings to produce the kilogram quantities of penicillin required for clinical trials,{{sfn|Williams|1984|pp=134–137}} but the Japanese [[attack on Pearl Harbor]] in December 1941 brought the United States into the war and infused a new urgency into penicillin production.{{sfn|Williams|1984|pp=134–137}}

Chain suggested applying for a [[patent]] on the penicillin process. His motivation was not potential profits, but the danger of it being patented elsewhere. Florey took up the issue with Sir [[Henry Hallett Dale|Henry Dale]], the chairman of the [[Wellcome Trust]] and a member of the Scientific Advisory Panel to the [[Cabinet of the United Kingdom|British Cabinet]], and John William Trevan, the director of the Wellcome Trust Research Laboratory, but they were adamantly opposed, as they considered the notion of researchers profiting from their work as unethical. The Americans had no such scruples, and took out patents on the deep submergence processes they developed.{{sfn|Macfarlane|1979|p=336}}{{sfn|Williams|1984|p=129}} Chain regarded Florey as naive for not patenting the penicillin production process.{{sfn|Mason|2022|p=319}}