Experiment Eleven

by Peter Pringle

  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.

  There was a long pause on the tape. Then, softly, Schatz started to sob. Then his anguish grew and he let out a long howl. At that point, Wainwright relented and turned off the tape.

  When Wainwright turned the machine on again, Schatz had recovered his composure.

  “The Nobel Prize,” he started slowly, “was a denial of my entity as a human being. It was a denial of what my wife and children deserved, of what my mother and father deserved, my uncle, who helped me, who worked in a mattress factory, who worked in an A & P [supermarket] and in a butcher’s shop to put himself through dental school.”

  “The Nobel Prize,” he said, “[should have acknowledged] all those people and what they did ... I’m glad you asked that question. I don’t resent it ... Don’t worry about offending me or hurting me ... I would never have told you this—if you had not asked.”

  Wainwright searched for something to say that would comfort the older man. “I can appreciate this because I came from the same [working-class] background,” he said. “It means something to be able to say to my brother, to my son, hey, I did it. It means something.

  “I suppose the only thing I can say ... is that a lot of people were saved by your contribution. That’s the thing you’ve got to concentrate on ... In reality, all those kids with [tubercular] meningitis who are now alive because of you. Their families didn’t suffer because of you ... In the final analysis, when you get to wherever one goes, that’s what adds up.”

  Before their meeting was over, Wainwright wanted to know how Schatz felt about Waksman.

  “There was a time I really hated him,” Schatz said. “I would have killed him if I’d had an opportunity to do so.”

  He paused, then added, “After a while I guess I just got numb. I tried to bury the whole thing by not talking about it, but I couldn’t. Even after he died, he was still there. He was like the weather: He was always there.”

  AT RUTGERS, THE professor of microbiology, Douglas Eveleigh, who happens to also be British, invited Schatz to visit his old university and give a seminar to students and faculty at the College of Agriculture. Schatz wanted to go, but he did not know if he could stand the level of emotion, on all sides. He suspected, correctly, that there were people at Rutgers who still regarded his lawsuit as an abominable act.

  He wrote to Wainwright, “If I accepted I would have to face, encounter, re-live, make peace with, a part of my life that I (and Vivian) have literally blacked out. At first, I was not confident that, emotionally, I would be able to go. But Viv and I talked it over and we decided we would go together.”

  Schatz called back and accepted, but another three years would go by before the official invitation to return to Rutgers finally came.

  IN 1990, WAINWRIGHT published the first popular account of Schatz’s work in a short book, titled Miracle Cure: The Story of Penicillin and the Golden Age of Antibiotics. It concentrated on new archive material on the discovery of penicillin, but also on what he had been able to find out about streptomycin. There was “no escaping the fact that Waksman reneged on the agreement that he had with Schatz concerning streptomycin royalties,” Wainwright concluded. Waksman had also ignored the fact that both the patent documents and the contents of Schatz’s thesis proved that Schatz was indeed entitled to be regarded as one of streptomycin’s discoverers. “It is all the more tragic then that Waksman could not find the humility to offer Schatz his fair share of both the rewards and the glory that the co-discoverer of streptomycin rightly deserved.”

  “One of
the annoying things,” Wainwright later told an interviewer from the Canadian Broadcasting Company, “is that any attempt to redress these problems in favor of Schatz is met with a blanket, a wall. I recently attempted to write an account of the Schatz case, and submitted it to medical journals and so on, and the reviewers have taken a very obstructive line on this. They said that I’m being anecdotal and I’m trying to forward the Schatz case after all this time. My feeling is quite straightforward, that I think Schatz’s case stands up. It’s very easy to corroborate everything he said, and he’s missed out on this opportunity, this great opportunity, to share in the Nobel prize.”

  26 • A Medal

  IN THE WINTER OF 1992, Rutgers planned another streptomycin celebration, this time for the upcoming fiftieth anniversary of the drug’s discovery. As part of the festivities, Rutgers Magazine, the alumni journal, ran a three-page article titled “A Nobel Quest.” Despite Milton Wainwright’s efforts, full honors for the discovery again went to Dr. Waksman. The professor had “found a cure for tuberculosis right under his feet,” and “success” had also come to him via the now-infamous sick chicken, which, the article said, had been carrying in its gullet A. griseus, a microbe that Dr. Waksman had “identified back in 1915.” Waksman “and his researchers” had isolated the strain that produced streptomycin. There was no mention of Albert Schatz, or Doris Jones, or the lawsuit, or Wainwright’s two articles, or his book, or a new book Tuberculosis: The Greatest Story Never Told by a British physician, Frank Ryan, that included and expanded on Wainwright’s original work.

  Schatz had come to expect nothing different from Rutgers. Selman Waksman had been dead for almost twenty years, but his ghost lived on, thanks to the Rutgers media team. Schatz immediately wrote three letters to the editor of Rutgers Magazine, one after the other over three days in February 1993, complaining about the “egregiously erroneous information” about the discovery and requesting a right of reply. “I am the one who actually discovered streptomycin,” he wrote. He was confident “that you and all others at Rutgers University want this 50th Anniversary celebration ... to be based on fact rather than on fantasy or fiction.” He included his usual list of relevant documents in support of his case.

  Lori Chambers, the senior editor of Rutgers Magazine, thanked Schatz for alerting the publication to the “errors and omissions.” They had been “inadvertent rather than intentional.” Chambers was “certainly convinced” by Schatz’s documentation that “credit for the discovery should be shared by you and Dr. Waksman.” She “empathized” with his “frustration.” She could “only apologize ... especially in light of the fact that you are an alumnus and this is the alumni magazine.”

  However, there was no question of Schatz writing his version of the discovery. There was no need, Chambers assured him. All would be put right in an editor’s note in the magazine’s next issue. She invited Schatz to send in a “one-page letter” addressing his concerns.

  As the fiftieth anniversary neared, another magazine, this time a more prestigious publication, added to the Waksman myths. The January 1992 issue of Smithsonian, published by the Smithsonian Institution, described the resurgence of tuberculosis in America, a situation attributed to, among other things, the Reagan-era cuts in community health services. “How TB Survived Its Own Death to Confront Us” also included a summary of the discovery of streptomycin, credited again to Waksman and the sick chicken. Dr. Waksman had “fortuitously discovered” streptomycin after the chicken had picked up a “strange infection from barnyard dirt.”

  Schatz wrote to the editor, saying that the article was a “complete distortion of history” and adding, “I know ... because I discovered streptomycin.” Doris Jones also wrote to Smithsonian, pointing out her part in the discovery and informing the editor that the chicken in question had not been sick and that she had not isolated the strain from the culture she had found in the chicken’s throat. Schatz had.

  “Over the years,” Jones wrote, “the story of streptomycin’s discovery has been terribly garbled. I think the Smithsonian magazine would do a great service if it asked Dr. Schatz to tell his own, accurate and interesting account of his finding ... Dr. Schatz’s role has been largely ignored.”

  Schatz sent copies of his letters to then–Rutgers president Francis Lawrence.

  In a letter to Smithsonian, Douglas Eveleigh, the professor of microbiology at Rutgers, also complained about the article, naming Schatz and Jones as the isolators of the chicken strain. The various protests made the difference.

  Within a few days, Schatz finally received an invitation, via Professor Eveleigh, to give a lecture to the Biotechnology Club on the Rutgers campus. “At first he wouldn’t go, it was too painful,” Vivian recalled. The lecture was in the Waksman Institute of Microbiology now named after him. Schatz had never visited the institute. A professor of entomology and plant pathology, Karl Maramorosch, met Albert and Vivian at the train station and drove them to the old college farm. Vivian distracted Albert by pointing out some familiar fungus on the trees. Schatz hesitated at the door of the institute, with its brass plaque to Waksman, but Maramorosch took him firmly by the arm, brought him inside, and insisted on taking a photo of him beside the bronze bust of his old professor that adorned the hallway. Schatz reluctantly agreed. “Let’s get this over with,” he said.

  The flyer for the lecture invited students to “come hear Dr. Albert Schatz, of streptomycin notoriety, reflect on 50 years of research.” Schatz told the story of his army service, of watching wounded soldiers die in the hospital for lack of a cure for their infections, and how he had returned to Rutgers determined to find a new antibiotic. He described how he had volunteered to work with the virulent H37Rv strain and how Dr. Waksman had never visited him in the basement lab. He repeated how Waksman had told Doris Jones that he was too immature to accept fame and that’s why he had excluded Schatz from the publicity. He told Waksman’s parable of the sick chicken, pointed out the errors, and, to prolonged laughter, said, “I don’t know what the normal lifespan of a chicken is, but this sick chicken has been alive for half a century. It’s amazing.”

  The lecture was the first in a series of public appearances at professional microbiology meetings, organized by Professor Eveleigh. One of them was the Selman A. Waksman lecture to the Theobald Smith Society, the New Jersey branch of the American Society for Microbiology. “We got a kick out of that one,” said Vivian.

  A year later, in 1994, to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the announcement of streptomycin, Rutgers University presented Schatz with its top honor, the Rutgers Medal. “The worldwide impact of this discovery is now part of medical history,” President Lawrence said. “You, thus, have brought distinction and honor to Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.” OVERLOOKED PIONEER FINALLY GETS HIS DUE, said one local headline. “Schatz receives overdue honors,” said the Rutgers student daily. “Rutgers will honor a snubbed drug pioneer,” said the Newark Star-Ledger, whose reporter roamed the award ceremony, looking for quotes. “Schatz was a pioneer,” declared Joachim Messing, the forty-eight-year-old director of the Waksman Institute. “I think one should put all the disputes aside ... It is just a fact that Waksman and Schatz made very important contributions.”

  Messing and other faculty members believed there had been no malice on Waksman’s part. It was a “matter of miscommunication.” But Schatz disagreed. In his view, he told the reporter, Waksman had made “an intentional grab for glory.” And he, Schatz, had been “blackballed in American science.” He had become known as a litigious character, and unemployable, “because I had rocked the boat.” Still other Rutgers faculty members, the reporter discovered, continued to hold Waksman in “such high regard that they pooh-pooh Schatz’s claim as the ranting of an ingrate.”

  Schatz came away with a sense of justice. He had been given the medal at the site of the old college farmyard that had produced the soil that had contained his griseus strain. But the story of Selman Waksman had been told so
forcefully and successfully over the years that one shiny medal was not going to make much difference. A new article in The Sciences, for example, gave sole credit to Waksman. Schatz’s latest ally Maramorosch wrote a letter complaining. The two authors of the article replied that they had been unaware of the collaboration. They had taken their cue from a brief survey of the historical references, which showed that the “habit of crediting Waksman as the sole discoverer of the drug was indeed widespread.”

  They quoted Waksman’s former student René Dubos, who had once written, regarding scientific discoveries, that “the cruel law of scientific life ... [is that]... credit goes to the man who convinces the world, not to the man to whom the idea first occurs.” The authors added, “It is unfortunate, that salesmanship plays so great a role in the recognition of scientific achievement.”

  Waksman’s son, Byron, added his personal view. There was a different academic etiquette in those days, he wrote. Before World War Two, “scientists who directed laboratory programs of any significance regularly appeared as senior authors on all papers emanating from their laboratories. Waksman was one of the first to wish to give his pupils and younger colleagues greater prominence by placing their names before his at the top of his papers. That fact should not mislead anyone about where the ideas, methods and organization of the program of discovery came from.” Byron Waksman said that he “felt sorry for Schatz who was a victim both of the changing fashions in scientific publication and of his own misapprehension of the relative importance of his role in the research.”