Selman Waksman

The village Selman Waksman left in 1910 sat in the Kiev Governorate of the Russian Empire, in what is now Ukraine. He carried out of Nova Pryluka a diploma from the Fifth Gymnasium in Odessa and little else. He enrolled at Rutgers College, took a bachelor's degree in agriculture in 1915 and a master's the next year, and was naturalised as an American citizen in 1916. What caught him was dirt. Under Jacob Lipman at the New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station he began cataloguing the organisms living in a gram of soil, and he never really stopped. A spell at the Department of Agriculture under Charles Thom taught him fungi. Berkeley gave him a doctorate in biochemistry in 1918. He went back to Rutgers and stayed four decades.

Waksman did not go looking for a lucky accident. From 1937 his laboratory ran soil microbes against disease organisms in a systematic matrix, rows of candidate compounds against columns of pathogens, on the premise that the actinomycetes rotting matter in the ground were making weapons medicine could borrow. Actinomycin came out of it in 1940, streptothricin in 1942, streptomycin in 1943 — the first drug that worked against tuberculosis, which had killed more people than any other infectious disease in history. He supplied the word for all of them: antibiotic. The Nobel followed in 1952.

Albert Schatz rejoined the laboratory as a doctoral student in 1943 and asked for the tuberculosis problem Waksman was afraid to handle. Working alone in the basement, sleeping on a bench, Schatz found on 19 October that an extract of Streptomyces griseus killed it. He was first-named author on the 1944 paper. He signed his patent rights to Rutgers for one dollar, then learned in 1949 that Waksman privately held 20 percent of royalties. He sued in 1950 and settled for 120,000 dollars, three percent of royalties, and a court finding that he was co-discoverer. Waksman's answer was that the drug came out of a screening programme he had built over 20 years, in which Schatz was one student among many. Schatz never worked in a first-rank laboratory again. Rutgers gave him its University Medal in 1994.

The royalties built things. Half of his share went into the Waksman Foundation for Microbiology in 1951, and Rutgers put its 80 percent into the Waksman Institute of Microbiology, which opened in 1954 with Waksman as its first director. He retired in 1958 and died on August 16, 1973, in a Hyannis hospital, buried at Woods Hole. What outlived him is the method: drug companies screened soil by the ton for 20 years afterwards and pulled out most of the antibiotic classes still in use. The credit question has not closed. The Lancet called the Nobel decision a considerable mistake in 2005, and a 2012 book drawn from Schatz's laboratory notebooks reopened the argument again.

Selman Waksman's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Principles of Soil Microbiology book
  The textbook that fixed the shape of the field 1927
• Humus: Origin, Chemical Composition, and Importance in Nature book
  Twenty years of counting what lives in dirt 1936
• Actinomycin discovery
  Found with H. Boyd Woodruff — too toxic for infection, later a cancer drug 1940
• Streptomycin discovery
  Isolated at the bench by Albert Schatz — the first drug effective against tuberculosis 1943
• Neomycin discovery
  Found with Hubert Lechevalier and still in topical use 1949
• My Life with the Microbes book
  The autobiography — Schatz is largely absent from his account of the discovery 1954

• 1910 aged ~22 Leaves Nova Pryluka for the United States He had just taken his diploma from the Fifth Gymnasium in Odessa.
• 1916 aged ~28 Naturalised as an American citizen He had taken a Rutgers bachelor's degree in agriculture the year before.
• 1940 aged ~52 Isolates actinomycin with H. Boyd Woodruff The first antibiotic out of the soil-screening programme he had started in 1937.
• October 19, 1943 aged 55 Streptomycin kills the tuberculosis bacterium in Albert Schatz's cultures Schatz was working alone in the laboratory basement with the H-37 strain.
• May 1, 1946 aged 57 Signs the streptomycin patent agreement with Schatz Both men took a token one dollar so that Rutgers would hold the royalties.
• December 29, 1950 aged 62 Schatz's suit ends with a court naming him co-discoverer The out-of-court settlement gave Schatz 120,000 dollars and three percent of royalties.
• December 12, 1952 aged 64 Takes the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine alone Cited for systematic study of soil microbes that led to the discovery of streptomycin.
• June 7, 1954 aged 65 The Waksman Institute of Microbiology opens at Rutgers He was its first director and retired in 1958.
• August 16, 1973 aged 85 Dies in a Hyannis hospital He was buried at Woods Hole Village Cemetery on Cape Cod.

• Sidney Farber 1903–1973
  The first remissions in childhood leukemia, and the Jimmy Fund supplied the drug
• Vivien Thomas 1910–1985
  Devised the blue-baby heart operation without a medical degree, and went unnamed on the paper. parallel credit dispute
• Jonas Salk 1914–1995
  Medical researcher who developed the first safe and effective polio vaccine. next disease brought down
• Rosalyn Yalow 1921–2011
  Invented radioimmunoassay with Solomon Berson, refused to patent it, and took the 1977 Nobel alone. fellow Nobel laureate
• George Washington Carver 1864–1943
  Agricultural scientist whose research on crop rotation and alternative crops transformed Southern farming. fellow soil scientist
• Maurice Hilleman 1919–2005
  Virologist who developed or improved more than forty vaccines, preventing millions of deaths and transforming public health. carried on the method