Experiment Eleven (13 page)

Looking back many years later, Waksman would describe 1946 as the year “
things began to happen
.” And Schatz would say it was the year he “really
began to feel uneasy
” about how Waksman was handling the intense publicity that streptomycin was attracting. Certainly, Waksman and Schatz set out on a collision course, which would turn the mutual admiration they had for each other, and the exhilaration of the discovery, into anguish and despair for both men.

FREE OF THE
patent commitment to Merck, Rutgers set up a new trust, the Rutgers Research and Endowment Foundation (RREF), to hold patents taken out by Rutgers staff. Rights to manufacture patented goods would be leased to companies in return for a royalty of 2.5 percent. Rutgers considered that it now owned the patents on the drugs being produced by Waksman's department and wanted Waksman to assign to the foundation “
all improvements
and future inventions.” In return, the university agreed to pay him a percentage of the royalties received. There was no question of paying the graduate “assistants” who were named as codiscoverers on
the patents, Boyd Woodruff for actinomycin and streptothricin and Schatz for streptomycin. It was simply assumed that because of their rank they would accept the assignment of their patents to the new foundation, and indeed, that was the protocol of the time.

Waksman was keen to do more than merely accept money. He offered to act as the manager of the patents, taking inquiries from interested companies both in the United States and abroad. Initially, Rutgers offered Waksman 15 percent of the net royalties received, after the legal and other expenses, a deal that was in line with other university patent agreements. But Waksman drove a hard bargain. In the final draft the figure “15 percent” was crossed out and
replaced with “20
”—the 5 percent being agreed on for the extra burden of work. He also protested the clause that included all his future inventions, and the clause was dropped.

Before they could execute the agreement for streptomycin, however, Waksman had to persuade Schatz to give up his rights to the patent, and this proved more difficult than Waksman had anticipated. On May 3, 1946, Waksman called Schatz into his office and asked him to sign the necessary papers, but Schatz hesitated. Why were they patenting a drug so badly needed by mankind? he asked. Waksman told him that assigning the patent was routine. Others had done it—Woodruff had done it for actinomycin and streptothricin. In fact, under the old deal, Woodruff had assigned his share of those patents to Merck—for whom he now worked.

Schatz said he needed to
think it over
, and, according to Schatz, Waksman lost his temper: “He told me that he had had enough trouble with my conceited and rebellious attitude and that I had better sign, as he had already done.” Waksman demanded that Schatz sign immediately, as the document had to be returned to the lawyer that very day and sent to Washington before a U.S. Patent Office deadline. It might even be too late, Waksman said. “He said that unless I signed at once there would be no patent,” Schatz recalled.

According to Schatz, Waksman told him, “Think it over for a few minutes.” Schatz understood that he was cornered, but not by the Patent Office. Also according to Schatz, Waksman told him that his name would be taken off the patent application and that he, Waksman, would use his influence to “
kill job chances
.” Schatz was afraid that Waksman could hurt his job opportunities by giving him bad recommendations, and he was not sufficiently knowledgeable about the business arrangement with the Rutgers
Foundation, or about patents, to challenge Waksman's assertions. The stakes were too high to refuse Waksman's request. Shortly, Schatz returned to Waksman's office and they shook hands, agreeing, again according to Schatz, that neither would profit from the deal; and they signed the papers. At no point did Waksman tell Schatz that he had already made a deal with the Rutgers Foundation to receive 20 percent of the net royalties.

ABOUT THIS TIME,
Waksman stopped introducing Schatz to reporters and other scientists who came to visit seeking information about the discovery of streptomycin. Schatz would learn about the meetings later from newspaper and magazine reports, or from other graduate students who were working with Waksman on the third floor. Invariably, he was portrayed as Dr. Waksman's “assistant.” But neither Schatz nor his family, especially Uncle Joe, was prepared to accept this downgrade, as they saw it.

In April 1946, two science publications named Waksman as the discoverer and Schatz as the “assistant.” The trade journal
Chemistry
published a first-person account titled “The Story of Antibiotics.” The other journal,
International Medical Digest
, a monthly journal of medical abstracts, did not mention Schatz at all, nor did it reference the two key papers in 1944 with Schatz as the senior author.

As a dentist, Uncle Joe had access to such journals, and he alerted Schatz, who wrote a letter of complaint to the editor of the medical digest. Schatz did not want to be seen confronting Dr. Waksman in public for fear that Waksman would not give the recommendations Schatz needed for future employment, so, with Uncle Joe's consent, he signed the letter using Uncle Joe's name, Dr. J. J. Martin, as his nom de plume. The letter complained specifically about the
omission of the two key papers
. “Streptomycin was discovered and isolated from the mold
Actinomyces griseus
by Dr. Albert Schatz,” he wrote, giving references to his two 1944 papers announcing the discovery.

The editor, not knowing who Dr. J. J. Martin was,
contacted Waksman
to check on the complaint, and Waksman, instead of informing the editor of Schatz's part in the discovery and the importance of the scientific papers mentioned, took the opportunity to reinforce his own role and cast doubt on Schatz's. In a four-page reply, Waksman said that the discovery
had come about as a result of “numerous studies,” starting in 1939; these studies were the high point of “investigations of more than 30 years duration” begun by himself in 1915, and in the work he had been “assisted by hundreds of graduate students and research workers.” All the steps necessary for the isolation of antibiotics had been worked out by himself and Boyd Woodruff in 1942, and that was why it had taken two years to isolate streptothricin and only “2 or 3 months” to isolate streptomycin.

About Schatz's role in the discovery, Waksman wrote, “The mere isolation of an antagonistic organism does not signify a great achievement, since a large number of such organisms have now been isolated and found to be active.” The fact that he had put Schatz's name first had no significance beyond his acknowledgment of the hours put in at the workbench. “I can assure you that I would have been more than justified to have reversed the order or even to have used a common procedure used in many other laboratories, namely to place
a footnote in the paper
thanking the assistants for technical service thus rendered.”

However, Waksman suggested, it might “have been desirable” to have mentioned two papers. One was the original 1944 paper announcing streptomycin, with Schatz as the senior author. But in place of Schatz's second key paper, dealing with the tests on H37Rv, he substituted his own paper that he had given at the Mayo Clinic, on which he was the senior author. Those two papers, one of Schatz's and one of his, Waksman wrote, “would have taken care of any criticism of incomplete references.”

Then Waksman addressed the “more important view touched upon by Dr. Martin: Who discovered streptomycin?” For the first time, he concocted a story—“a parable,” he called it—about the chicken strain, D-1, that Schatz had isolated from a petri dish of
A. griseus
given to him by Doris Jones. Parables are narratives of imagined events used to illustrate a moral or spiritual lesson. They are not factual. But Waksman used this “parable” in his reply, and would use several different versions of it later, to rewrite one essential act of the discovery.

The story he told began with a farmer bringing a sick chicken to Dr. Beaudette, the poultry pathologist at the Rutgers School of Agriculture. The chicken was said to be suffering from a peculiar bronchial ailment. At that time, Doris Jones was working under Dr. Beaudette trying to find an antibiotic effective against chicken viruses. After examining the chicken, Dr. Beaudette told Jones to swab the chicken's throat and put the sample
on a petri dish to see if she could find any of the “antagonist organisms that Dr. Waksman is so interested in.” Jones saw several colonies of actinomycetes and took the dish to Albert Schatz, suggesting that he should test them for the antibacterial properties. Schatz found one culture was active against Gram-negative bacteria. He brought the culture to Dr. Waksman, who identified the species as
Streptomyces griseus
. Waksman then instructed another assistant, Betty Bugie, to carry out certain tests that led to the “isolation and identification of the antibiotic.” Later, he called in other assistants to make further tests and “thus streptomycin came into being.”

So, Waksman asked in his parable, who was responsible for the isolation of the streptomycin-producing strain? Was it Schatz, was it Jones, was it Dr. Beaudette, was it the distressed farmer, was it the sick chicken? His answer: “No doubt it was the chicken, because it was she that had picked it up from the soil and started the chain of events that led to the isolation of streptomycin.”

In a P.S., Waksman wrote, “I would appreciate it if the contents of this letter are not published except with specific permission.”

In the years to come, Waksman would revise his “parable,” each time turning it a little more to his advantage, until it became the official version of what had happened.

IN MAY 1946,
a second story cast further doubt on Albert Schatz's character. Waksman complained to his deputy, Robert Starkey, that there had been an unauthorized visit to the laboratory where Schatz and Jones were working, and that a member of Schatz's family had carried off Schatz's crucial lab notebook of the streptomycin discovery. For the first time, Waksman put locks on the lab doors. According to a letter in Waksman's archives at Rutgers,
Schatz explained
that he had been having trouble with his back and was in bed that day, and his paycheck was due. The checks were left in the laboratory building, and he had asked Uncle Joe to pick up his. Apparently, a staff member had seen Uncle Joe and reported him to Waksman. Schatz promised it would not happen again. That was the beginning and end of the story, as far as Schatz was concerned. As to Waksman's accusation of a missing notebook, Schatz's notebook of the discovery was not in the lab at the time of the alleged “break-in.” Waksman had sent Schatz's notebook and his own to Merck,
at the company's request
, because
it needed them to present the streptomycin patent application. The matter was dropped—but only for the time being. Waksman would bring it up again, much later.

IN YET ANOTHER
incident that spring, Waksman would admit that he was deliberately keeping Schatz away from the publicity gathering around streptomycin. Doris Jones went to see Waksman on an entirely separate matter. She wanted to complain about Schatz's domineering presence in the lab where they were searching for antibiotics against viruses. He was so alert and active that she sometimes worried he might “squelch” her own ideas, she said.

In the course of conversation she referred to Schatz's “bossiness,” and Waksman, to her surprise, suddenly launched into an attack on Schatz's “immaturity.” It was the reason, he said, why he had decided to keep Schatz out of the story of the discovery of streptomycin. All the publicity would “go to his head.” That was why he was keeping him away from reporters. He told her this “
confidentially
” as a way, apparently, of helping her resolve her problem with Schatz.

Jones was stunned. In her view, no one could have failed to notice how Schatz had been sidelined. Schatz himself had complained directly to Jones about “Waksie” hogging the publicity. But here was Dr. Waksman, her wonderfully erudite and supremely confident professor whom she admired so much, apparently needing to explain his actions to her, a mere graduate student. It was most out of character. It was as though he had some “hidden guilt,” she thought, as if he were trying to “justify his actions to little old Doris,” who could be relied upon, despite the “confidentially” admonition, to pass the information to others.

She would never recall the conversation precisely, but neither would she ever forget the incident. In fact, she did not tell Schatz for several years. Their problem was sorted out quite amicably between the two of them.

FOLLOWING THESE INCIDENTS,
and with Vivian about to graduate, Schatz was ready to leave Rutgers. Waksman found him a job, almost immediately, as a
senior bacteriologist
at the New York State Department of Health in Albany, and gave him a glowing recommendation, quite the opposite
of the confidential assessment of Schatz he had just given Jones. He told his new employer, “He is still relatively young (about 27) but he
has a
mature
[emphasis added] judgment
and can plan and carry out his work. I have full confidence that he will justify himself in any position of trust which will be given to him. He has been associated with me for a period of nearly 4 years ... He has made an important contribution to the subject of antibiotics. Although he is primarily a bacteriologist, he has had sufficient training in organic chemistry and biochemistry to be able to carry through his own chemical investigations.”

Schatz accepted the job and was due to depart Rutgers after four years in the graduate program. One day, however, he was talking with Waksman in his office and took the opportunity to complain, “as diplomatically as possible,” that Waksman had been getting all the credit in articles about streptomycin. Schatz recalled that Waksman “
became incensed
and started shouting at me that he would never tolerate another Joffe”—a reference to Waksman's earlier spat with Jacob Joffe over the order of names on a scientific paper. “He then had his secretary type a letter from me to him dated May 21, 1946, telling him that I had worked under his supervision etc [and] he insisted that I sign [the letter]. I signed because I needed letters of recommendation from him when I applied for jobs.”