A biochemistry grad student discovers streptomycin, an antibiotic that will be used to treat tuberculosis and other infectious diseases.
Sole credit for the discovery initially went to Selman Waksman, who ran the laboratory at Rutgers University where the research was performed. But it was Albert Schatz, a twenty-three-year-old graduate student under Waksman, who actually isolated the antibiotic, after months of feverish work.
The key that unlocked streptomycin was Schatz’s isolation of two active strains of actinomycete bacteria. Both could stop the growth of other, stubbornly virulent strains of bacteria that had proven resistant to penicillin, itself a new wonder drug.
Years later, Schatz told the Guardian about his moment of discovery:
On October 19, 1943, at about 2 p.m., I realized I had a new antibiotic. I named it streptomycin. I sealed the test tube by heating the open end and twisting the soft, hot glass. I first gave it to my mother, but it is now at the Smithsonian Institution. I felt elated, and very tired, but I had no idea whether the new antibiotic would be effective in treating people.
It proved the most effective way to fight tuberculosis, a deadly and often fatal infectious disease still widespread at the time.
Waksman, who had once described Schatz as his most gifted student ever, took full credit—and the 1952 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine—after getting the young man to sign over his royalty rights to Rutgers. Schatz said he’d agreed because he believed that streptomycin should be made available quickly and cheaply.
But feeling slighted and discarded, Schatz sued his former mentor and the university in 1950, winning an out-of-court settlement. It was 1990 before Schatz finally received the official credit he had spent four decades pursuing.—TL