Experiment Eleven (27 page)

Feldman said that to have accepted would have been “in conflict with my concept of the principles governing my role as an independent investigator. For me to assign funds from such sources to charitable, educational or research institutions it would first be necessary for me to accept the funds ... As one who has served science with devotion and much distinction
for most of a busy and productive life you will, I am sure, appreciate my point of view and accept my decision with understanding.”

During his twenty-three years as a member of the staff of the Mayo Clinic, he added, “I have been afforded complete freedom to conduct my research in the best traditions of an academic community. This is considered to be the sine qua non of my scientific endeavors.”

Waksman wrote back, “I regret sincerely that you found it advisable
to refuse the small royalty
which the RREF offered, at my recommendation, to place at your disposal. This was
not
a court decree but a gesture of appreciation on our part.” He had included Feldman in recognition of “the important part that you and Dr. Hinshaw have played in establishing the role of streptomycin in tuberculosis.” But, out of his wishes, he had taken Feldman's name off the list.

Waksman was clearly troubled by a second rejection from a chemist named Walton Geiger, who had worked in Waksman's Rutgers lab. Geiger had been a graduate researcher at the time of the streptomycin discovery. His decision to reject the offer was written up in the
New York Herald Tribune.
He believed that proceeds from royalties should be plowed back into research, and in a letter to Waksman he quoted several academic references to support his decision.

Waksman replied to Geiger, “
I am sorry
that you felt compelled to do that. I have read carefully the papers that you submitted and could not find any justification for your action. However, I respect your wishes.” He had wanted to argue with Geiger's decision, but Watson suggested it was now wise “for all of us to say and write as little about the Schatz case as possible
in the hope that
discussion will subside.”

ONE OF THE MOST SUCCESSFUL OF
Rutgers' PR myths was that Waksman “gave up millions” in royalties from streptomycin; another was that he was almost fired at the beginning of World War Two. Feature writers from the popular weekly newsmagazines found such stories irresistible. Rutgers and Waksman worked hard to keep the myths alive, and at the beginning of 1952, when
The American Magazine
called on Waksman for a profile, the professor was in dazzling form, showing no hint of his bruising legal battle. The
American
had started life as a muckraker's journal, but by the 1940s it focused on social issues and human interest stories, with a star list of contributors, including Agatha Christie, Graham Greene, Dashiell Hammett, Upton Sinclair, P. G. Wodehouse, and H. G. Wells.

The reporter spent several days on campus, where he heard the story of Waksman's
almost being fired
in the winter of 1941–42. According to the story, Rutgers was short of funds and had to cut the budget drastically. Waksman's salary was a big one—$4,620. One penny-pincher suggested that was an easy cut. The fifty-three-year-old scientist was, in his opinion, just “fooling around with microbes.” But Waksman was supposedly saved from the ax. Waksman knew that this tale was “about the
biggest hoax
that could have been perpetrated,” but instead of correcting the story, he embellished it.

Asked why he didn't want to become a millionaire, Waksman replied, “What would I do with all that money? I'm too busy to be a millionaire. I
have work to do.” When the reporter moved on to his work on antibiotics, Waksman's “features lit up as they never did when we talked about money.”

“Do you realize we haven't even made a beginning?” Waksman declared.

The reporter found Waksman “so completely absent-minded that the role might seem overdrawn if presented on the stage.” The five-page feature, with a picture of Waksman in a white lab coat handling a test tube of microbes, wrote its own headline and subhead: “He Turned His Back on a Million Dollars: An Intimate Glimpse of a Distinguished Scientist Who Passed Up a Sure Fortune for the Greater Reward of Freeing Mankind from Disease.”

The reporter credited Waksman, and Waksman alone, with the discovery of streptomycin. Albert Schatz was never mentioned. A single paragraph dealt with the lawsuit as a bid for money from a former student. Like other journalists before him, the reporter was easily charmed by the “small, stocky compact man ... in rumpled and un-pressed clothes [and] high-buttoned, un-shined shoes ... [who] badly needed a haircut.” The story was Waksman's carefully crafted fable, half true at best.

OUT OF THE
popular media spotlight, thousands of miles away from fawning American reporters, Dr. Waksman's career was under scrutiny of a very different kind. Behind closed doors, the faculty of Stockholm's Royal Caroline Institute was deciding who should be awarded the highest honor in the medical world, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

Each year since 1900, the institute has sent out requests for nominations from academics and practicing doctors. The nominations have to be submitted by February. They are evaluated through the spring and summer by a committee, then voted on by the twenty-five full professors of the institute. The award is announced in October, the month of Alfred Nobel's birth, and is presented by the Swedish monarch in Stockholm in the second week of December to commemorate the anniversary of Nobel's death on the tenth of that month.

In 1952, for the
seventh year in a row
, Waksman had been nominated for his work on antibiotics. The first nomination had come in 1946 from a professor of pharmacology at the University of California, San Francisco. Those were early days for streptomycin, which had only just been approved for general sale. The recommendation was for Waksman's “work on soil
organisms, and the development of streptothricin and streptomycin.” But he didn't even make the short list for at least one good reason. The year before, Alexander Fleming, Howard Florey, and Ernst Chain had been given the prize for penicillin. The Caroline Institute had already recognized the discovery of how antagonistic microbes can provide wonder drugs, and the second discovery, streptomycin, although full of promise for ending the scourge of tuberculosis, had not quite proved itself.

As the wonders of streptomycin became more established with each passing year, though, the pressure was building to notice its place in the galaxy of inventions. The next year, 1947, Waksman had been nominated five times, twice on his own for “work on antibiotics” and three times with William Feldman and Corwin Hinshaw. Those nominations had combined the two stages of the discovery: the “identification” of streptomycin and the “experimental and clinical investigation of its properties.”

The word “discovery” only started to appear in the 1948 nominations. Of the five in that year, two were proposed by Turkish physicians from Istanbul, one by an Italian neuropsychiatrist from Rome, one by a German professor of surgery from Göttingen, and only one by an American, a professor of medicine from New York. The Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine determined that the discovery of streptomycin, which it attributed to Waksman alone, was worthy of a prize, but it was concerned about the real effectiveness of the drug and decided to wait for more clinical tests.

In 1949, and again in 1950 and 1951, the committee concluded that the clinical results were sufficient for a prize, but Waksman lost out to two brain researchers in 1949, to three researchers on adrenaline in 1950, and in 1951 to a researcher who had discovered a breakthrough in the treatment of yellow fever.

At the beginning of 1952, Waksman was nominated again—four separate times—and so, for the first time, was Albert Schatz. A Yugoslav professor of medicine, Jevrem Nedelkovitch, who had experienced the powers of streptomycin at his hospital in Belgrade, had read the scientific papers announcing the discovery of streptomycin and nominated Schatz, Betty Bugie, and Waksman, in the order that they appeared on the 1944 paper announcing the discovery.

During the summer, the Nobel Committee asked for opinions from two leading members of the Caroline Institute, Professor J. O. Strombeck, a
prominent plastic surgeon, and Einar Hammersten, the institute's professor of chemistry.

Strombeck was asked to give his opinion on Waksman, who had been proposed in a general way for his work on streptomycin. On the basis of the success of the clinical trials of streptomycin in Britain, the United States, and Sweden, Strombeck concluded that streptomycin's effect, primarily against TB infection in humans,
deserved a prize
. In short, Waksman should be given the award.

Hammersten had
a more difficult task
. Because of his expertise in chemistry, he was asked to look at all the nominations: the set that proposed Waksman alone; the set proposing Waksman and two chemists, Karl Folkers from Merck and Oscar Wintersteiner, of New York; the set proposing Waksman, Feldman, and Hinshaw; and, finally, the nominations of Schatz, Waksman, Bugie, and Boyd Woodruff (for his work on the extraction techniques for streptothricin).

Hammersten then reviewed the evaluations of Waksman going back to the “preliminary assessment” in 1946, when Waksman's entry had not made the crucial transition to a “special assessment” by the Nobel Committee (the short list). In 1947, Waksman, Feldman, and Hinshaw were nominated for the “identification of streptomycin and experimental and clinical investigation of its properties and of other antibiotic agents” together by three professors of medicine at the Mayo Foundation Graduate School of the University of Minnesota. Hinshaw was invited by the Nobel committee to go to Stockholm
to show his data
. The three men qualified for a “special assessment,” and even though streptomycin was now available to the public in America, they were not found worthy of a prize because the committee still wanted to see more data of streptomycin's effects on human infectious diseases.

In 1948 and through 1951, there had been a clear consensus that Waksman alone was worthy of the prize, and Hammersten started by grading Waksman against the chemists.

For this, Hammersten went back to the discovery of streptothricin, the second antibiotic found by Waksman and Woodruff in 1942. The method they had used to extract and purify the drug had consisted of adsorption onto carbon and the elution, or removal, of the antibiotic with weak acid. This had not been a groundbreaking method, as Woodruff himself had made clear in his deposition during the lawsuit. But under examination
by Eisenberg, Woodruff had gone to great lengths to explain that the novelty had not been in any one method, but in the “association of steps” taken.

Eisenberg had asked, “Were the methods that you used, or were used in the isolation of the antagonists that produced actinomycin and streptothricin, novel?”

“Well, novel is a hard word to define in laboratory work ...,” Woodruff had responded.

Later, Eisenberg had pressed the question, and Woodruff had replied that it was “the
association of steps
, known steps in the right order leading to the isolation of a concentrated purified or crystalline material which can be considered novel.”

EISENBERG: In other words the steps by themselves, taking each step separately, was not a novel procedure?

WOODRUFF: That's right.

EISENBERG: But the order in which these steps were taken you say was the novelty?

WOODRUFF: Yes.

But Hammersten, under the Nobel protocol set up for evaluating candidates, was required to consider “
only scientific publications
concerning the work of and by prospective candidates.”

He relied solely on the published scientific papers, and not at all on the lawsuit transcripts, in making his evaluation. He argued that the chemists had done complimentary work and would have to share a prize, but also that their isolation and purification work had not gone far enough beyond Waksman's original crude attempts at purification to warrant an award. What the chemists had done was extraordinary work, but was not, in the end, prize-worthy, because Waksman had shown the way. Hammersten concluded that credit should go to Waksman for using a method of extraction for streptothricin that could be later applied to streptomycin.