Experiment Eleven (15 page)

On his return to Rutgers, he volunteered to be a member of a team of biologists monitoring what happened to the flora and fauna of the land and waters of Bikini when the bomb exploded. The scientific team was a small part of the forty-two-thousand-strong force gathered to monitor the tests. The U.S. Navy had assembled an unmanned fleet of more than ninety vessels, including three captured German and Japanese ships, to see the effects of the blast on them.

“We were on deck around eight in the morning with our eye masks distributed by the Navy,” Johnstone recalled. “They had such dark lenses you couldn't see anything. Instructions came over the loudspeaker—to put on our masks and put our arms up across our faces. At the moment of the explosion, we were told to turn away, and when we were allowed to turn back we saw the mushroom cloud.”

The bomb was between fifteen hundred and two thousand feet off target and had only what the navy called a “transient effect” on the target flotilla, but it still sank five ships. About ten days later, Johnstone and the other biologists, equipped with their own Geiger counters to measure radiation, were allowed onto the island to take samples. The Pentagon was interested in what happened to the bacteria in the waters stirred up by the bomb blast, but Johnstone was more interested in the actinomycetes in the coral sands. These sands had a high pH, which Johnstone knew was ideal for actinomycetes.

In the days prior to the test, Johnstone had collected sandy soil samples and tested them in his ship's laboratory against known pathogens he had brought with him from Rutgers. He found several promising zones of antagonism, and when the Bikini bomb tests were over, he took the microbes home and grew them in petri dishes in the basement lab at the Department of Microbiology—the same lab in which Schatz had found streptomycin in 1943.

Within a few weeks, he found a culture that produced an antibiotic with almost exactly the same powers to destroy harmful microbes as streptomycin, including nonpathogenic strains of
Mycobacterium
—the same ones, from the Rutgers culture collection, that Schatz had first used against his strains 18-16 and D-1.

Three years after Schatz's discovery, Johnstone had found another
actinomycete, an entirely different species, that apparently produced streptomycin. In fact, in all of his two or three hundred cultures from Bikini, Johnstone never saw a single
A. griseus
. And his discovery was nothing to do with the atom bomb radiating microbes on the beach and producing mutants that then produced streptomycin. He had collected his cultures
before
the blast.

Waksman told him to check his experiments, just as he had told Schatz to check his on
A. griseus
, and then write them up for publication. They agreed on a name,
Actinomyces bikiniensis
, and they called the new antibiotic streptomycin II. On May 15, 1947, Johnstone announced the discovery at a meeting of the Society of American Bacteriologists in Philadelphia.
SCIENTIST TELLS
OF NEW DRUG: STREPTOMYCIN NO. 2 CAME FROM BIKINI, reported the
Philadelphia Evening Bulletin.
Like its predecessor, the newspaper said, it worked against the tuberculosis germ.

But Johnstone added that his streptomycin II was slightly better than streptomycin I. Two-tenths of a unit of streptomycin I were needed to accomplish the same effect against the TB germ as was produced by one-tenth of a unit of streptomycin II.

After the meeting, he suddenly found himself surrounded by drug company representatives wanting him to go work for them, but “I told them no, I wanted to stay in basic research at a university,” he later recounted.

When he got back to Rutgers, Dr. Waksman “was beside himself,” Johnstone recalled. Waksman told him that the newspaper stories were “embarrassing.” The composition of the new drug that Johnstone had discovered was not yet known; it looked like streptomycin, but no one yet knew whether it was really the same thing, as the reports had said.

“You better get out there and give the newspapers an account so you won't
embarrass the rest of the world
,” Waksman said. Johnstone followed his professor's order: “I gave a report blasting the [original] report that it was
something new and better
.”

What Johnstone did not know at the time was that Waksman was in the middle of applying for a “product” patent for streptomycin. Waksman was asking the patent examiner to grant rights for the substance streptomycin, as produced by
A. griseus
. He apparently did not want to be distracted by another, similar discovery.

THE SAME MONTH AS THE BIKINI
test, July 1946, Vivian graduated from the Women's College. Uncle Joe bought Schatz a secondhand car, and the young couple made their way to Albany, in upstate New York, where Schatz would start his new career as a civil servant employed by the state's Department of Health. Robert Clothier, the president of Rutgers, gave Schatz a farewell letter expressing his “
sense of regret
” that Schatz was leaving. “It has been a source of great satisfaction, both official and personal, to have had you associated with us and I hope that continued success and happiness will be yours.” Schatz was pleased to have the letter even though he realized it was mostly a formality. A more genuine letter came from a member of the staff of Plant Pathology, who recalled that Waksman, “in the presence of several others,” had said, “Schatz was the
most brilliant student
I ever had.” It was said “in all sincerity.”

But there was no farewell letter from Waksman himself, and Schatz had not expected one. Uncle Joe had been keeping his vigil on the media.
Time
magazine had run a story on “Streptomycin Wonders” with the news that the drug was now being distributed to sixteen hundred U.S. hospitals. It was “
a triumph for the drug's discovery
in 1944 by Rutgers's microbiologist Selman A. Waksman.” Schatz wasn't mentioned. The
New Jersey Journal of Pharmacy
had run a story on the discovery after interviewing Waksman. The story described the discovery as a “product of extensive studies in soil microbiology by Dr. Waksman.” Using his Uncle Joe nom de plume, Schatz complained, and the journal obliged with a correction. While the credit it had given Waksman was accurate, it “does not mean
that
sole credibility
for the discovery ... belongs to him. Dr. Waksman would be the last to make such a claim ... Today, practically no major discovery in science is the product of one man's work.” If Waksman saw the correction, and Schatz was sure that he did, as he read everything, then he made no comment.

The staff of the department of microbiology on the steps of the administration building after Albert quit Rutgers. Selman Waksman is in the front row wearing a bow tie, with Dr. Starkey (left) and Dr. Geiger (right). In the back row is Donald Johnstone (left), and in the next row, fourth from the left, is Doris Jones (ca. 1947). (Special Collections and Archives, Rutgers University Libraries
)

SCHATZ HOPED THAT
the storm over the patent had blown over. Waksman had not mentioned it again, and Schatz was keen to forget it and begin his new life with Vivian away from Rutgers. He started a regular correspondence with Waksman, writing at least once a month, telling him how he was getting on and sending “regards to the group.” He even asked Waksman for a
photograph
that he could put on his desk, and Waksman sent him one.

These letters were always friendly and personal. Schatz would tell Waksman if he felt he was not doing so well. He found he was not good at handling pressure from above. “I don't mind work and I have not been loafing here by any means. But it ‘feels' different when I drive myself. But I suppose this will always be with me, so I'd
better get used to it
.”

Waksman responded with concern and advice. He suggested that Schatz belonged in a “pure research organization”—Caltech, in Pasadena, for example. He should have “no difficulty” in getting a fellowship from the U.S. Public Health Service, or Merck. Or Schatz might like to take a year off in Europe, or even Russia, if the situation improved sufficiently to welcome foreign visitors.

ALBANY WAS CERTAINLY
not the expected career move for a brilliant student who had played a key role in the discovery of the world's most-talked-about new miracle cure. The city itself was dull. The capital of New York State lived in the long shadow of New York City, 150 miles to the south, and was the seat of a corrupt state legislature.

Even so, the Health Department's Division of Laboratories and Research, where Schatz worked, had an international reputation. Known as the “Division,” it was founded in 1880 as a combination of a scientific laboratory doing pure and applied research, an educational institution, and an operating public health service. It was respected by scientists worldwide. The Division's director, Gilbert Dalldorf, who had joined in 1945, was concerned that the successes of penicillin and streptomycin against bacteria would make public health researchers complacent about diseases caused by fungi and especially viruses, for which there was no cure.

Dalldorf had led a “
determined effort
” to establish virus studies at the Division at the beginning of 1946, and Schatz joined the virus team. But funds for the Department of Health were limited. Schatz found the labs poorly equipped,
lacking enough egg incubators
and mice cages to do adequate experiments. Plans for a new virus building kept being postponed because real estate prices were high after the end of the war. Another reason was that Governor Thomas Dewey was planning a run for the presidency against Harry Truman, and with his eye on the 1948 election, he was using the state's coffers for political favors, not the civil service, which faced pay and staff cuts.

Schatz kept Waksman informed of these problems, and Waksman offered fatherly advice and urged him not to be discouraged. He recalled the shortages at Rutgers after World War One: “We almost had to make our own test tubes and petri dishes.” Any beginning was difficult, he counseled. “One should figure
about a year
before the laboratory is well-organized.”

Overall, Waksman must have been relieved that Schatz had left Rutgers—he could now make his own way with streptomycin—and Schatz had readily accepted the Albany job because he was keen to get out from under Waksman's wing. He was also now married and in need of the money. Pure research, unattached to business or the government, was what he would have preferred to be doing, but in 1946 such work was barely possible in America without a fellowship, and while Waksman had mentioned the idea of a fellowship, he had not offered to help him find one.

The ever-restless Schatz turned to other things. “I'm determined to get a general cultural education,” he wrote Doris Jones. “This business of science, science, straight science, technical stuff and more technical stuff seems to make scientists among the dullest people in the world. There are different people, different ways of life, different philosophies, there are histories and arts. I shall now begin to learn some of this for man is emotional as well as intellectual ... To develop one of these aspects without the other is to
grow lopsided
.” He told Waksman he was determined to become fluent in Russian. He had translated one Russian paper, only a page long, but it had taken him a whole day.

Vivian found a job as a bacteriologist in a local hospital, but when Albert pointed out how unsanitary the place was, she quit. She found a different interest. Paul Robeson had been invited by Albany's Israel African Methodist Episcopal Church to sing at a local school, but the city had refused to issue a permit because the House Un-American Activities Committee had linked Robeson to communists. Robeson was a Rutgers graduate, and Vivian joined the Let Paul Robeson Sing Committee, running flyers around town. A local judge ruled that
Robeson could sing
, provided he did not discuss politics. The FBI was following Vivian and had opened a file on her, though she would not know this until seven years later. In 1952, when she and Albert were living in Philadelphia, the FBI knocked on their door and asked Vivian about her colleagues on the protest committee. She told them she could not remember anything.