Experiment Eleven (34 page)

ON WAKSMAN'S EIGHTIETH
birthday, in 1968, Rutgers held a celebration in his honor. To mark the occasion, the university produced a book of
forty-eight “selected” scientific articles
covering his distinguished career. A tribute from his former student Boyd Woodruff concluded, “As a result of the conquering of the scourge of tuberculosis, the accolades of children alive because of his discoveries, the gratitude of parents, the opportunity to dedicate royalties to support new research, all have become the reward of the achievements of a lifetime.” The two most important papers of Waksman's career—the announcement of the discovery of streptomycin in 1944, and
the report on its action against the TB germ, also 1944, each with Schatz named as senior author—were not among the forty-nine papers selected. In the 386 pages, apart from other scientific listed as references, Schatz's name appeared only on the last page, in a list with seventy-six other students who had worked under Waksman and been awarded advanced degrees. The book's editor, Boyd Woodruff, pointed out that it
included Waksman's acceptance speech
at the Nobel Prize ceremony in Stockholm. The speech was titled, “Streptomycin: Background, Isolation, Properties and Utilization.” Schatz's two key papers are listed in the references. However, Waksman does not refer to Schatz when discussing the drug's isolation, only in a list of twenty of his students at the end.

On August 16, 1973, Selman Waksman died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage on Cape Cod. He was eighty-five. He was buried in the local cemetery at Woods Hole. The
New York Times
, in its obituary, used a new adjective to describe his streptomycin work. He was the “
principal discoverer
.” The other twenty-six “who had worked with him on the search” had been rewarded with a share in the royalties “after a court dispute with one of the students.” There was no mention of Albert Schatz by name.

At the memorial service at the Rutgers Institute of Microbiology, Byron Waksman spoke of his father's quiet, ironic natural humor. Max Tishler, the Merck chemist who in the 1940s had helped Waksman devise methods of extracting his antibiotics, admired the success of the links he had forged with industry. Ernst Chain, the chemist who had won the Nobel Prize with Alexander Fleming and Howard Florey for penicillin, spoke passionately about a fellow European's assiduous labors in the New World that had brought him to the top of his profession, and secured him a Nobel Prize.

Other tributes flowed—to Waksman's astonishing productivity: more than 350 technical papers, plus writing, editing, or coauthoring about thirty books, all while directing the studies of his seventy-seven graduate students. Waksman did not belong to the publish-or-perish era of researchers—he had no need to prove himself; he was a master in his field. Yet in the decade from 1940 to 1950, his name was on 113 papers, or nearly one a month. He was the lead author on 87 of them. His major book on microbe antagonism was published, in two editions, in the same decade.

The question arose: How much time did he spend in the laboratory bench—and how much of the work was done by his assistants, like Albert
Schatz? In 1940, when he switched his research to full-time antibiotics, he was spending
half a day
in the laboratory on the third floor of the administration building, according to his graduate student Boyd Woodruff. Then, after his first antibiotics discoveries, he began to spend more time in his office. By the end of the 1940s, according to another graduate student, Hubert Lechevalier, he was rarely seen in the lab, and had become “
strictly a manager of research
.” Lechevalier concluded, “I suspect that he stopped working in the laboratory rather early in his career but that he relapsed from time to time as he found subjects that
really interested him
.”

Still more tributes to Waksman noted his enthusiasm and passion for science, which he was said to have shared liberally with his adoring students. His discovery of antibiotics had been the crowning achievement of his career. Most reviews of his life emphasized his productive links with industry, characterizing him as a pioneer in what today is known as “technology transfer,” the often controversial contractual relationships between universities and business.

A few looked at Waksman's career as a scientist and remarked on his preference for applied over pure science, his concentration on the “
systematic development
of a few ideas” rather than the pursuit of new ones. In this regard, his style of research was compared with that of his former student René Dubos, who had discovered gramicidin in 1939 and had been a big influence on Waksman's change of direction to antibiotics. Bernard Davis, who had collaborated with Dubos on tuberculosis research in the 1940s and had later become a professor of bacterial physiology at Harvard Medical School, made this comparison in 1990: “I would reinforce the picture of Waksman as primarily a natural historian of the soil, cataloguing the microorganisms found there, and focusing on their taxonomy and their ecological effects. He was not a person with the intellectual restlessness that characterized Dubos. But perhaps for that very reason, he was more patient with a kind of search that had to survive several dead ends before yielding a product with the selective toxicity necessary for chemotherapy.” Davis suggested that Waksman's “
really important discovery
was not streptomycin; it was the principle that a patient, systematic search for useful antibiotics will eventually pay off.”

Perhaps the best-considered, and the
most concise, comparative
assessment also came later from Waksman's former student Hubert Lechevalier. He had worked with Waksman on his antibiotic projects in
the late 1940s. In 1948, he had produced neomycin from the actinomycete
A. fradii
, described by Waksman and Roland Curtis in 1916 and named after Waksman's mother, Fradia. Lechevalier described Waksman's antibiotic project in a paper given at a conference on the history of antibiotics sponsored by the American Chemical Society. Lechevalier wrote,

Naturally Waksman considered that he was chiefly responsible for the discovery of streptomycin since it was the fruit of one of his research programs which had already uncovered some interesting antibiotics such as actinomycin and streptothricin ... He had also been mainly responsible for turning it from a laboratory curiosity into an anti-tubercular agent.

Also, naturally, Albert Schatz considered himself co-discoverer of the drug since he had performed most of the basic laboratory manipulations involved in this discovery, and since his name was on the original paper reporting the discovery of this antibiotic, on several other papers published later, and on the U.S. patent which was eventually issued in 1948. In addition, streptomycin was the subject of his thesis which he defended in 1945.

AND THERE THE STORY MIGHT HAVE
ended if it had not been for the curiosity of a
young British lecturer
in microbiology at the University of Sheffield. In 1987, Milton Wainwright heard that Rutgers was preparing to celebrate the centenary of the birth of Dr. Selman Waksman, and he was intrigued by stories of the dispute between Waksman and Schatz. As a historian of science with a special interest in antibiotics—he had studied Fleming's discovery of penicillin—he went to America in search of the archives.

Wainwright could take his research only so far, however. At Rutgers, the academic staff told him they had no idea where Schatz was, or indeed if he was still alive. His name did not appear in any recent abstracts of scientific papers, and he was not listed as a member of any scientific clubs or associations. He was not even on the Rutgers alumni mailing list.

What Wainwright found in the Rutgers archives, however, convinced him that Schatz alone had discovered streptomycin and that Waksman had unjustly taken the full credit. In 1988, he wrote up his findings in the
Society for General Microbiology Quarterly
, a British periodical founded in 1945 by Alexander Fleming, among others. “Anyone who reads Schatz's thesis cannot doubt that it was he who made streptomycin a reality,” he wrote. At the end of the article, he included a footnote to this “
major, if largely overlooked scandal
,” asking readers for any information on “the whereabouts of Dr. Albert Schatz.”

By chance, Waksman's
former student
Hubert Lechevalier read the
Wainwright article. He notified Wainwright that the word on the microbe grapevine was that Schatz was now teaching a course in science education at Temple University, in Philadelphia, an hour's ride from Rutgers.

For many years now, Schatz had avoided speaking about streptomycin. “I
stopped long ago
telling people what happened,” he had written Doris Jones in 1983. If anyone asked, he told them that “the whole thing is buried in the past and I prefer to leave it there. Then some people think that I take that attitude because I feel guilty, ashamed, etc of what I did. So, whatever I do, I can't win.”

When Wainwright asked for an interview, Schatz was nervous, but he decided to see him. For one thing, Wainwright had not been involved; for another, he had already shown by his 1988 publication that he was prepared to look into the matter more deeply than others had done.

In February 1989, Wainwright visited Schatz in his modest two-bedroom row house in Mount Airy, a pleasant suburb of Philadelphia. Over four days, the two scientists faced each other across Schatz's dining room table and
recorded their conversation
on a bulky cassette tape recorder.

For Schatz, it was an occasion filled with emotions that he struggled to control. Apart from Doris Jones, no one—none of his colleagues, no professors, no students, no writers, and certainly not a historian of science—had ever asked him to tell his whole story.

Schatz was entering his seventieth year, but his memory was sharp, and he had assembled for his visitor his personal archive of scientific papers, letters, and newspaper clippings, even photographs of his childhood and his courtship of Vivian. Vivian was also present at the recording session, providing her own recollections.

Slowly and painstakingly, Schatz reconstructed what had happened in the basement laboratory on the Rutgers campus almost half a century earlier. It was just what Wainwright had hoped for, and Schatz obviously found the session therapeutic, a chance to unburden painful memories.

“I can't convey to you what it means to have you come here to ask me these questions,” Schatz began. “Do you understand? Nobody has ever done this, nobody in science.”

“Let me say, I'm being a bit selfish in coming here,” Wainwright replied in his soft, Northern English accent. “I am after the story. I am after the facts.”

Albert Schatz interviewed by Milton Wainwright at Schatz's home in Philadelphia, February 1987. (Courtesy Vivian Schatz
)

Schatz paused. “But how many have been after the story and written the facts without ever talking to me?” he asked.

“Well, I couldn't do that—” Wainwright began again, but Schatz interrupted him.

“You
are
the first individual in science in forty-five years who has ever expressed a serious interest in finding out what happened from my point of view. You
are
the only one who has expressed an interest in anything that I might have to say.”

“I can't understand that,” Wainwright said. “It reflects so badly on those scientists.”

Wainwright wanted more than just the facts. “It's very difficult,” he continued. “I feel I'm being very cold here asking these questions. The way I feel about it sounds a little corny, [but] I cannot believe the injustice. I suppose there's a bit of a rebel in me. I don't like the world to go on without this being known ...”

It was a strenuous interview. When they came to the Nobel Prize, Schatz could no longer control his emotions.

“So, what did it mean to you—the award of the Nobel Prize to Waksman?” Wainwright asked.