Experiment Eleven (28 page)

Hammersten then turned to the question of the part played by Waksman's collaborators in these extraction experiments. In this early work, he noted, Woodruff was a “
medarbetare
”—literally “with work,” and with a general meaning in Swedish of “colleague” or “collaborator,” but when applied in this sense, of a master and his apprentice in the laboratory, definitely meaning “apprentice.” The signal to the Nobel Committee of the Caroline
Institute was clear, and Hammersten did not have to spell it out: Woodruff was too junior in rank to be considered as an equal to Waksman, and therefore the credit should go to Waksman alone. If Hammersten had considered him as Waksman's equal, he would have written “
collega
,” a colleague of equal merit.

So, thus far, Waksman alone had been approved for a prize, by Strombeck for the discovery and by Hammersten for his part in the extraction. That left yet another assessment of the relative parts played by Waksman, Bugie, and Schatz.

Schatz was the senior author on both the 1944 papers, but, as is the custom in such publications, the text gave no clue as to who had done what in the experiments leading to the discovery. This was, as always, a complex matter of personalities and actual lab work. The experiments had been written up impersonally in the passive tense. The paper said that streptomycin “was isolated from two strains of an actinomycete.” The person who had isolated the strains could be identified only by reference to the laboratory notebooks. But, again according to the rules, Hammersten could not delve deeper than the scientific papers—he did not look at the lawsuit file, the patent application, or the lab notebooks.

In examining the first paper, announcing the discovery of streptomycin, Hammersten therefore missed the later affidavit that Betty Bugie had given to the Patent Office acknowledging that she had had “nothing to do with the discovery of streptomycin.” He didn't consult Schatz's Ph.D. thesis, or Schatz's laboratory notebooks, which showed, beginning with Experiment 11, that Schatz had been the first to isolate streptomycin and had also prepared crude extracts by the traditional method of adsorption on carbon and then elution with acid.

From the second paper, reporting streptomycin's effect on the TB germ, on which Schatz was the first and Waksman the second author, Hamersten could not have known that it had been Schatz, working alone in the basement laboratory, who had risked catching TB while testing streptomycin against the virulent strain of the disease.

Finally, Hammersten reviewed Waksman's work on the
griseus
strain that Schatz had used to make the discovery. Hammersten concluded that Waksman alone had isolated
S. griseus
in 1919 and in 1942 had found, together with other students including Woodruff but not Schatz, that the actinomycetes were especially promising producers of antibiotic substances.

This paragraph not only has the year of Waksman's isolation wrong (it was 1916), but is a reductio ad absurdum view of the history of the
griseus
strain. As mentioned in earlier chapters of this book, Waksman was not the first to isolate
griseus
. It was first isolated, and named because of its grayish color, by the Russian researcher Alexander Krainsky in 1914. Streptomycin was indeed isolated by Albert Schatz from a strain of
S. griseus
, but not the strain that Waksman had isolated in 1916, which did not produce an antibiotic. Schatz had found a new streptomycin-producing strain. In addition, Russian researchers had in fact already mentioned that the actinomycetes were promising producers of antibiotics substances.

Hammersten, bearing in mind the award of the Nobel Prize to Fleming, Florey, and Chain in 1945, also pointed out that Waksman had developed streptomycin further than Fleming had developed penicillin, and Waksman had been involved in the methods used to extract and purify streptomycin.

Hammersten summed up his review by saying that because of Waksman's well-known and leading position in the discovery of streptomycin, and because only Waksman's name appeared on the three most important papers announcing the discovery, he alone should be considered
as the discoverer
. Albert Schatz was a
medarbetare
, an assistant of inferior rank.

IN THE WEEK OF OCTOBER 20,
1952, reporters from Swedish newspapers began calling Waksman for interviews. They had heard he was going to share the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Then photographers called to arrange to take pictures. And on Thursday, October 23, at four o'clock in the afternoon, the Royal Caroline Institute announced that Selman Waksman, alone, had won the prize “for the discovery of streptomycin, the first antibiotic which is effective in cases of tuberculosis.” The
citation was specific
. It was for
the discovery
itself. The next day, October 24, the
New York Times
ran a front-page story, WAKSMAN WINS NOBEL PRIZE FOR STREPTOMYCIN DISCOVERY. Waksman's prize “crowned decades of relentless effort that root back almost to the moment he set foot in America.”

Reporters and television crews turned up on the cramped third floor of the Administration Building, where the sixty-four-year-old Waksman told them, “This is the culminating point of my life's work begun in 1915 with the study of a humble group of soil microorganisms, the actinomycetes. I feel particularly proud for the field of science which I represent, microbiology, and for the institution where I have done my major work, the College of Agriculture and Experiment Station of Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.” For the occasion, he selected his oft-repeated quote from Ecclesiastes about medicines coming from the soil. “The Lord created medicines out of the earth, and he that is wise shall not abhor them.”

Waksman would remember the day as being filled with telegrams
from all over the world, from former students, colleagues, well-wishers, tuberculosis sufferers and “foreign groups proud of the accomplishments of an ‘
immigrant boy
.'” His office was “
bedlam
... swamped with reporters, photographers, radio and television groups.” He “had to answer all sorts of questions.” But his life was now so full of awards and honors that the award was really only “another surprise” in his busy life.

A few days later the Associated Press wire service chose Waksman as man of the year for science in its annual awards. President Dwight Eisenhower won for politics, Queen Elizabeth II was woman of the year, Ernest Hemingway was honored for literature, Marilyn Monroe for entertainment, and the boxer Rocky Marciano for sports.

In his interviews celebrating the award, Waksman did not mention Albert Schatz. But the newspapers did. The
New York Times
noted that Waksman was the fourth researcher in antibiotics, after Fleming, Florey, and Chain in 1945, to receive the prize. In a paragraph inside brackets, the
Times
also reported that while Waksman was widely credited with the discovery, he had acknowledged in 1950 that Dr. Albert Schatz, an assistant to Dr. Waksman, at the time was “entitled to credit legally and scientifically as co-discoverer.”

The
Philadelphia Inquirer
went further. “Progress today,” it editorialized, “in any field, but particularly in medicine, is usually achieved only by the co-operative effort of many persons.” Much depended “on the individual researcher” who “may be the head of a project or one of the rank and file. If the latter, he deserves a
share in the honor
.”

Albert Schatz had left his job at Brooklyn College and moved to a new research post at a small school, the National Agricultural College, in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. Fifty miles from Rutgers, in the converted farmhouse he now used as a laboratory, Schatz was stunned. He could not believe what the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine had done. How could it have ignored the published evidence of his involvement—the two crucial scientific papers that named him as the senior investigator in the discovery, and the court settlement, on which the ink was barely dry, honoring him as the co-discoverer of streptomycin? He kept staring at the citation:
for the discovery of streptomycin.
He felt as though he had been dealt a blow that denied his “
entity as a human being
.” At an Ivy League college, missing the award might have been taken in stride—there would be other opportunities to win a Nobel—but the leaders of the tiny
National Agricultural College decided to protest what they saw as a great injustice. Within a week, the college's vice president, Elmer Reinthaler, had drafted a letter to the secretary of the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine, Professor Göran Liljestrand. Reinthaler expressed the “
amazement
” of the college's administration and faculty that the award had been made solely to Waksman.

Choosing his words carefully and respectfully, Reinthaler wrote, “We are certain that so distinguished a body as the Council of the Caroline Institute could not have been aware of, and yet ignore, certain most pertinent facts regarding the discovery of streptomycin and the original co-discoverers thereof.” He cited the 1945 Nobel Prize in Medicine, which had been awarded “in the most equitable manner” to Fleming, Chain, and Florey. If penicillin could have more than one prizewinner, why not streptomycin? He enclosed a short history of the discovery, with the relevant scientific papers showing the part played by Schatz, adding that the college was “convinced that further consideration by your Council would be well warranted.”

At the same time, Schatz launched his own appeal. He drew up a list of colleagues he thought might support him and prepared a “resolution” that he planned to ask them to sign. The resolution “assumed” that the nominations submitted to the committee had “neglected to stress the role played by Dr. Schatz in this discovery, thus depriving him of his
rightful share
in the prize.” Addressing the matter of rank, in case the committee had given the prize solely to Waksman because he was the head of the laboratory, Schatz argued that he should not have been excluded from the award simply because his thesis had been supervised by Waksman. There was “ample precedent” in the history of Nobel awards to the contrary: the Polish-French Marie Curie, for physics, in 1903 (she had shared the award with Pierre Curie); the Swede Svante Arrhenius, for chemistry, in 1903; and the French Louis de Broglie, for physics, in 1929. The work for which they had received Nobel Prizes had been “largely embodied in their doctoral dissertations.” So it was with Schatz's thesis on streptomycin.

“Under the circumstances and on the basis of the available evidence we must regretfully state that, in our opinion, an injustice has been inflicted on Albert Schatz,” the resolution declared. The document quoted a passage from the 1950 book
Nobel, the Man and His Prizes
, which had been edited by the Nobel Foundation. Committee secretary Liljestrand had written in the book about an underlying intention of the Nobel to help
promising young researchers by providing “such complete economic independence for those who by their previous work had given promise of future achievement that they could ever afterwards devote themselves entirely to research. While an award, therefore, to an old scientist at the end of a fruitful career would seem to be a well-deserved tribute to truly important achievements, it would scarcely harmonize with Nobel's own ideas.” Kurt Stern, a professor at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, agreed to organize the petition.

The replies to the appeal came back swiftly but were not encouraging. Most scientists did not want to be drawn into the dispute, while some expressed outright hostility to the idea of an appeal, even opposing Schatz personally. They sided with the professor and chastised the student for being uppity. In many ways they were defending the system that had rewarded them. They did not want it undermined from below.

In an especially blunt letter, Albert Sabin, professor of pediatrics at Cincinnati's Children's Hospital, said that Schatz was behaving “like an
ungrateful, spoiled, immature child
.” And when he grew up, he would regret what he had done. Sabin, a Russian immigrant who would become famous for the development of an oral vaccine against polio, wrote that, in his opinion, “Dr. Schatz should have considered himself to be an unusually fortunate graduate student in having been permitted by Dr. Waksman to participate in the great work he was doing. Any other graduate who might have been in Dr. Schatz's position with the inspiration and the tools supplied by Dr. Waksman would have achieved the same. The Nobel prize is not awarded for accidents. It is awarded for the discovery of important new principles which open up new fields of research. This Dr. Waksman has achieved. In this achievement, Dr. Schatz made no contribution.”

A British chemistry professor, Maurice Stacey, of the University of Birmingham, echoed what many of his colleagues felt about rank. Schatz, while playing an important role, had been, after all, only a student. “I cannot agree that such a
junior person
should share the great honor of the Nobel Prize,” Stacey wrote. “Surely this was given to Dr. Waksman in appreciation of a lifetime's outstanding work in microbiology. Whatever Dr. Waksman's personal faults, and they may well be many, scientists recognize him as one of the world's leading authorities in his subject and doubtless the Swedes had this in mind when they awarded him the prize.
If Dr. Schatz is as good as you appear to think he is, then surely his day will come in the future!”