Experiment Eleven

by Peter Pringle

  Some of this work had industrial application. With a colleague, he even took out a patent on chelating microbes that might be used in the soil to release minerals useful for plant growth. But that ended unhappily when the National Agricultural College thought that it ought to have been the owner of the patent—even though his colleague did not work for the college and most of the work had been done before Schatz had arrived there and the patent never resulted in any royalties. The disagreement could not be resolved, and Schatz was fired.

  He applied for several jobs in research labs and was sometimes accepted by more than one at a time, but as he was deciding which position to take, inexplicably the “offer was gone,” as Vivian recalled. Schatz saw the hand of Waksman in these sudden withdrawals, but there is no documentation to support that charge. It seems more likely that it can be attributed to his post-lawsuit reputation as a troublemaker. “So all I did was ‘intellectualize about [my ideas],’ he told a colleague. “The research went on in my head ... The positions I did get were ‘survival positions.’”

  The thrust of his work was often against the establishment; that was his nature. As an early green movement activist, he challenged the fertilizer companies to end their dominant funding of soil research, which had led to decreasing attention being paid to natural, organic fertilizers. An article of his on the subject was published in a 1966 issue of Compost Science, an organic-farming periodical. He wanted to pursue this attack further, but could not find sufficient funding.

  With Uncle Joe, he set up a small publishing company to publish their research on the chelation theory of dental caries and their opposition to fluoridation as a means of fighting tooth decay. Earlier, Schatz had joined the husband of his sister, Elaine, in running a celery farm in New Jersey, but they could not compete with the low price of the California product.

  Whenever an opportunity to set the streptomycin record straight presented itself—a new version of Waksman’s story in the newspapers or magazines or in a scientific journal, or a new book with related material—Schatz would fire off a letter to the editor, or a colleague, under his Dr. J. J. Martin (Uncle Joe) nom de plume. Two such opportunities arose in 1955.

  Albert Schatz with Uncle Joe at the National Agricultural College in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. (Courtesy of Vivian Schatz)

  As “Dr. J. J. Martin,” he wrote to William Wightman, a lecturer in the history and philosophy of science at the University of Aberdeen, who had just published The Growth of Scientific Ideas. Schatz enclosed details of his discovery of streptomycin—and how the story had been wrongly told.

  Thanking “Dr. Martin” for his documentation, Wightman replied, “It is as well for historians to know that neither International Adjudicating Bodies, nor men of science themselves are proof against acts of folly and corruption.” The Nobel judges had committed “a double act of folly” in his view, ignoring the codiscoverer and the patent documentation showing what Schatz had done.

  But Wightman also did not approve of the Nobel Prize being awarded to anyone for the discovery of streptomycin—“a discovery, which, though important in relation to a particular problem of therapy, involved no new scientific principle; being in fact only an extension of the principle first established in the case of penicillin, to which a prize had already been awarded.”

  Schatz sent another letter under Uncle Joe’s name to the Cambridge University professor of animal pathology, W. I. B. Beveridge, who had just published a much acclaimed book on scientific research, The Art of Scientific Investigation: An Entirely Fresh Approach to the Intellectual Adventure of Scientific Research. In a review of Beveridge’s book, the New York Times said that “many of the author’s statements deserve to be quoted in every treatise on the psychology and practice of research.”

  Beveridge replied to “Dr. Martin” that the misallocation of merit in the Schatz case, as “Dr. Martin” had outlined it to him, was “as you say a particularly bad case, but one knows of other such incidents.” It showed only, he said, that “some scientists are no better in these matters than other people.”

  In his book, in a section headed “The Ethics of Research,” Beveridge had addressed the question of whose name came first on scientific papers. “Another improper practice which unfortunately is not as rare as one might expect, is for a director of research to annex most of the credit for work which he has only supervised by publishing it under joint authorship with his name first.” The aim, he wrote, should be to avoid overlooking the junior person as “merely one of ‘and collaborators.’”

  Waksman could not be accused of this scientific sin in the Schatz case. He had put Schatz’s name first on the two key papers on streptomycin, but when he was challenged later by Schatz, this apparently generous and well-deserved act had in fact no real meaning in Waksman’s mind.

  Schatz seemed to derive some comfort from continuing to seek justice, as he saw it, through this kind of correspondence. But no one in America, popular journalists or scientists, asked him for his story. Schatz decided to leave the country.

  IN 1960, VIVIAN started a Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania, and Albert became the bacteriologist at Philadelphia General Hospital. It was a good job, and he had a parking place with his name on it. One day in 1962, he met a visiting professor from the University of Chile, in Santiago, who was looking for an American to help his university organize its science faculties. So Albert, Vivian, and their two daughters moved to Santiago. Vivian became director of the new American School in the Chilean capital of Santiago. It was one of the happiest times of their lives, an opportunity to forget the disappointment of streptomycin.

  They stayed in Chile for three years. It was a time of political upheaval, with increasing popular support for Salvador Allende, Chile’s future socialist president. “We had Chilean friends who were socialists, and we had to keep that quiet at embassy gatherings,” Vivian recalled. But even in their self-imposed exile, it turned out, they could not escape streptomycin and Dr. Waksman.

  One day, William Feldman of the Mayo Clinic turned up in Santiago on a tour of South America. After contracting tuberculosis from his experiments, he had suffered through a long period of rehabilitation. Now he had recovered and was enjoying his South American tour. He and Schatz met at the university and chatted about old times. Feldman was surprised to learn that Schatz had been the one who had supplied him his first samples of streptomycin; Dr. Waksman had never mentioned it. And Feldman told Schatz that he had refused to take the money from the royalties that Waksman had allocated to him. It had been a matter of principle not to take rewards from his research, he said.

  In the small scientific community that existed in Santiago at the time, the story of Schatz’s part in the discovery of streptomycin became widely known. In 1964, he was honored by Chilean doctors and invited to give a speech about his discovery to the medical community, including the Chilean ministers of health and education. It was the first time since his lawsuit that he had been invited to talk about streptomycin to a professional body—and the first time he had described the discovery since his 1946 paper to the New York State Association of Public Health.

  Schatz used the occasion to launch a blistering attack on Waksman, in all but name. During the past two decades, he said, the story of the discovery of streptomycin had been “enshrouded in an aura of fantasy.” Certain “supposed events” had never really occurred, or, at least, “not in the way that has been claimed. Some minor things which did happen, have become exaggerated out of all proportion to their significance. Other really important information has been completely overlooked, distorted, or concealed.”

  There was a myth, he said, that the discovery of streptomycin had depended, somehow, on the earlier discovery of streptothricin, that it had “pointed the way.” In reality, the “research which resulted in the discovery of streptomycin” had been a “logical extrapolation” of the earlier Russian work on antagonistic microbes. “When I began the search for an antibiotic agent effective against
tuberculosis, it was the findings of the Soviet investigators, not streptothricin, which gave me confidence that such a substance could be found.”

  The search for antibiotics at Rutgers had been described as a systematic research when in reality it had been “nothing of the sort,” Schatz said. It had involved the “most routine techniques for isolating and testing cultures.” There had been no rational basis for choosing one organism over another or for choosing the media in which the cultures had been grown, he said. “No one knows in advance which organism will produce a new and useful antibiotic.” The “background information” on actinomycetes in the Rutgers laboratory had not been helpful in knowing which ones to pick. Finally, he said, it had also been a “remarkable coincidence” that the antibiotic he had isolated was effective against Gram-negative organisms, and also the Gram-positive tuberculosis germ.

  The attack on Waksman might have gone nowhere if Uncle Joe had not, once again, intervened. He suggested that Schatz send a copy of his lecture to one of his publishing outlets (for his dental caries articles) in Pakistan.

  So, two decades after he had isolated S. griseus, after many articles by and about Waksman in newspapers, magazines, and scientific journals, after fictional accounts from the Rutgers PR machine, after the lawsuit and the Nobel Prize, Schatz’s own account was published not in a journal of microbiology or medicine in America, or even Europe, but in the Pakistan Dental Review, in Lahore. If Waksman saw a copy, he never mentioned it. And it received no attention in the American or European media.

  In 1965, Schatz and his family returned to America at the end of his contract, and Schatz accepted a job at Washington University in St. Louis, teaching science education. But in Missouri, as elsewhere, Schatz could not escape Waksman’s shadow. Before he could start teaching, the university required Schatz to have a test for tuberculosis. The test was positive. It didn’t mean that the disease would develop, and he had no idea where he had picked up the germ, but it was a stark reminder of his streptomycin work in the basement laboratory. He would always wonder whether it was there that he had picked up the germ.

  It was also the year when the patent on streptomycin expired, and another opportunity for the Rutgers PR Department to praise Waksman for his discovery. The Passaic Herald-News, faithful to its local hero, reminded its readers that they should also consider the forgotten “co-discoverer.” Under the headline “Great Boon, Sad Story,” the paper said that it was “unfortunate” that Rutgers “saw fit only to mention” Dr. Waksman.

  To celebrate the twenty years of the streptomycin patent and twenty-five years of antibiotics from his lab, Waksman himself wrote an eight-page article titled “A Quarter Century of the Antibiotic Era,” for the American Society for Microbiology. In describing his discovery, Waksman acknowledged the help of experts from Merck, Pfizer, and Squibb, but Schatz’s name did not appear, not even in the referenced scientific papers.

  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 streptomy
cin; 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.

  25 • The English Scientist

  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.