Experiment Eleven Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  PART I: THE DISCOVERY

  1. Zones of Antagonism

  2. The Apprentice and His Master

  3. The Good Earth

  4. The Sponsor

  5. A Distinguished Visitor

  6. The Race to Publish

  7. A Conflict of Interest

  PART II: THE RIFT

  8. The Lilac Gardens

  9. The Parable of the Sick Chicken

  10. Mold in Their Pockets

  11. Dr. Schatz Goes to Albany

  12. The Five-Hundred-Dollar Check

  13. A Patent That Shaped the World

  PART III: THE CHALLENGE

  14. The Letter

  15. Choose a Lawyer

  16. The Road to Court

  17. Under Oath

  18. The Settlement

  PART IV: THE PRIZE

  19. The Road to Stockholm

  20. “A Dog Yapping at the Heels of a Great World Figure”

  21. The Drug Harvest

  22. The Master’s Memoir

  23. The Copied Notebooks

  PART V: THE RESTORATION

  24. Wilderness Years

  25. The English Scientist

  26. A Medal

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  A Note on the Author

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  To the researchers in science

  who did the hard work, and never

  reaped the glory.

  Complete honesty is of course imperative in scientific work.

  —W. I. B. Beveridge, The Art of Scientific

  Investigation, 1957

  PART I • The Discovery

  1 • Zones of Antagonism

  EVERY DAY AT DAWN IN THE summer of 1943, a young graduate student could be seen striding briskly across the peaceful campus of the College of Agriculture. He was short, wiry, and handsome, his sharp features focused intensely on his important mission. Even his clothes seemed an afterthought, a wrinkled white shirt and loose gray pants, worn and reworn like those of any devoted researcher surviving on a meager stipend and the excitement of his work. He came from the direction of the Plant Pathology greenhouse, where students were breeding new varieties for President Franklin Roosevelt’s Victory Gardens. He hurried past the dairy, with its herd of experimental Holsteins, past the poultry house, where Rhode Island Reds competed with white Leghorns for egg-laying prowess, and finally arrived at the Georgian-style Administration Building, which celebrated the proud colonial history of Rutgers University.

  Albert Schatz, the harried student, was the first to arrive each day at the Department of Soil Microbiology. He let himself into the empty building and descended quickly into the basement laboratory. He pulled on his long white lab coat made of heavy cotton, worn haphazardly like his clothes and with a tear down one side. Then he began work on his experiments, searching for new antibiotics among the microbes he had found in the farmyard soil.

  On that morning of August 23, he sat at his workbench and opened his notebook. On page 32, in his meticulous cursive, he entered the date and the title of his new experiment, “Exp. 11 Antagonistic Actinomycetes.” Then underneath, with the precision of a ledger clerk, he wrote, “Control soils Nos. 2, 7A, 18A, leaf compost, straw compost and stable manure plated out on egg albumin agar. Transfer made from colonies of actinomycetes selected at random ... by casual macroscopic observation.” And he added, for accuracy, “Some actinomycetes obtained from plates of swabs of chickens’ throats ... from Miss Doris Jones.”

  It was the fourth summer of the world war and, although the New Jersey college farm was thousands of miles from the front lines, almost everything, even the plants in the greenhouse and the microbes in the soil, had some link to the war effort. Schatz had come to the college because he wanted to be a farmer, but now, aged twenty-three and at the start of his doctorate career, he found himself engaged in a special war-driven mission. Instead of hunting for microbes that could break down soil to make it more fertile, Schatz was part of a scientific race to find microbes capable of producing new and more powerful antibiotics. His Experiment 11 was a routine test, one of hundreds being made by other graduate students working on this nationwide project, but it would be much more than that.

  By 1943, Eleven U.S. drug companies were producing penicillin, the first antibiotic, discovered by Alexander Fleming in 1928. The first vials of penicillin were being rushed to the front to treat common infections from battle wounds. But in this war, a new threat had emerged: biological weapons. Allied intelligence reported that Germany and Japan would not hesitate to use bombs and shells filled with deadly germs like anthrax, cholera, typhoid, and even the plague. Penicillin had no effect on such diseases.

  The researchers best suited to the task of finding new antibiotics were not at medical schools, but at the agricultural colleges. “Aggies” like Albert Schatz were quite familiar with microbes from the soil that were capable of producing a chemical toxin that killed off the harmful bacteria that might be used in biological weapons. Each time they grew these microbes in a petri dish, they saw the telltale clear zones, or “zones of antagonism,” as they were known, killing fields measured in millimeters where one microbe battled another for space or food. If they dropped penicillin into a petri dish of typhoid bacteria or cholera or the plague, no clear zones would develop. For this job, a stronger antibiotic was needed, the kind that Albert Schatz was hoping to find.

  The basement laboratory where Schatz worked was primitive and sparsely equipped, grim even by the utilitarian standards of the times. But to this determined young man it was a hideaway, a place where he could work uninterrupted. And he had volunteered for this isolation. His ambitious Ph.D. had two parts: One was to find antibiotics against cholera and typhoid; a second was to find a cure for the deadliest of all infectious diseases, tuberculosis. Over the previous two centuries, two billion people had died from tuberculosis, caused by a slow-growing, pickle-shaped microbe, Mycobacterium tuberculosis. It was highly contagious, spreading easily from a victim’s sneeze or spit. Known as the “Great White Plague,” TB cut down rich and poor alike, although in the Industrial Revolution it spread more easily in the crowded slums and factories. In wartime it spread quickly in bombed-out cities and crowded refugee camps. There was no effective cure. Doctors had tried everything from prolonged rest to fortify the body’s resistance, to drastic collapsed-lung surgery, to a range of alchemies and the new so-called sulfa drugs discovered by German researchers from industrial dyes. Albert Schatz’s professor, Dr. Selman Waksman, had warned of the risks. Waksman insisted that when Schatz handled the deadly TB microbe, he must work alone in the basement and never bring the germ to the labs on the third floor.

  In recent days, Schatz’s laboratory had taken on the appearance of an ancient dispensary. In one corner an aging autoclave, a kind of pressure cooker used for sterilizing glassware, hissed away. Conical glass flasks contained rich dark brews of meat extract similar to gravy, a concoction Schatz used to feed his microbes. On his bench were rows of petri dishes with microbe food in agar, the jellied extract of algae that microbiologists use for growing their molds. The microbes Schatz was cultivating came from the multicolored and somewhat mysterious group known as the actinomycetes, or “ray fungi.” These are strange, thread-like creatures that first appeared more than four hundred million years ago. They have wispy hyphae like the tentacles of a jellyfish, half bacteria and half fungus, a sort of evolutionary link between the two. They were favorites of Dr. Waksman, and common in the farmyard soil, and they had already shown promise in producing antibiotics. They form str
ikingly beautiful colonies of blues, reds, and grayish greens, and in the soil they are responsible for the pleasant odor of earth after a light rain.

  Albert knew where to look for them. His favorite hunting grounds included the compost heaps of moldering leaves and twigs outside Plant Pathology, and the college stables, where he filled pots of fresh horse manure. The richest for his experiments, he knew, was the freshest—less than twelve hours old. Each gram of soil or compost Schatz collected was teeming with millions of different microbes, but always some actinomycetes. He diluted the soil with tap water and let drops of the mixture fall onto petri dishes containing microbial food in the jellied agar. Then he incubated the dishes and watched the actinomycetes grow. Within a few days, he had good colonies of mold in his petri dishes. Some of them were surrounded by the telltale clear zones, indicating that they might be antibiotic producers. He chose his likely candidates for their robust look and their widest zones of antagonism, like a gardener spotting a sturdy shoot, or a farmer selecting a high-yielding crop for breeding. Then he tested them for their action against known disease-producing bacteria from the same group as the typhoid and cholera germs.

  By mid-September, he had selected two strains of a species of a gray-green actinomycete named griseus, Latin for “gray.” One strain had come from heavily manured farmyard soil and he named it 18-16, for the sixteenth strain of the eighteenth soil sample. The other came from a colleague, Doris Jones, as he had noted in his lab notebook. He named her strain D-1, for Doris. Much quicker than he had dared to hope, Schatz had become convinced that he had discovered a new antibiotic, the first to be found in the Department of Soil Microbiology for several months, and everyone was excited, especially Dr. Waksman.

  But no one could yet know whether his discovery would be useful as a medicine; if it was powerful enough to destroy typhoid and cholera it might also destroy human body cells. And it was only the first stage of Schatz’s project; he still had to see if his new antibiotic would be effective against the toughest germ that causes TB. Schatz checked and rechecked Experiment 11, running the same tests over and over again until he was sure that he had not made a mistake. Each effort was carefully recorded in his lab notebook.

  By the middle of October, he had confirmed that 18-16 and D-1 were indeed behaving like good producers of a new antibiotic. On October 19 at two o’clock in the afternoon, he placed a culture of his Actinomyces griseus in a test tube and sealed it for posterity by heating the end over a Bunsen burner and twisting the glass shut. That weekend, he wrapped the tube in cotton wool, put it in his pocket, and caught the train from the Rutgers University town of New Brunswick to Newark, then the bus to Passaic, where his parents lived in a working-class section of the textile town on the Passaic River. There, he showed the test tube to his father, Julius, and his uncle Joe and presented it to his mother, Rachel. She had not finished grade school and had no real idea what the test tube represented. He told her that he had found a new medicine that might eventually fight the infectious diseases, maybe even tuberculosis, that she had seen too often destroying the lives of her friends and neighbors. That she could understand.

  2 • The Apprentice and His Master

  The schatz family came from the peasant class in the old Russia, and their entry into America is an immigrant story of the kind often told at the turn of the twentieth century. Albert’s grandfather, Shlomo (Sam) Schatz, was a butcher, and his grandmother’s family, the Tunicks, were known for their physical strength and much revered in the community for forming local vigilante committees to defend Jews during the pogroms. Sam himself was a strong man who once, legend has it, leaped on a bull that was running amok through the village and wrestled it to the ground. But Russia was a barren and hostile place, especially for Jews, and Sam left his village on the outskirts of Minsk in 1899 and immigrated to America, leaving his pregnant wife, Rose, and their five children with her father, Ephraim. He arrived at Ellis Island and moved in with a cousin on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. It took him five years, working as a house-painter, to save enough money to bring his family, including Albert’s father, Julius, to New York.

  The family lived in a walkup, and soon after their arrival one child died of a weak heart. They moved into a Brooklyn tenement, and Sam and Rose had six more children, but the man who could wrestle a bull grew weak from heavy smoking and living in the putrid city air. When doctors told him he should leave for a life in the country, the Jewish community had just the answer.

  Baron Maurice de Hirsch, a German-born Jewish banker, gave mortgages to immigrant Jews to enable them to build their own barns and homes. He also set up the small Woodbine Agricultural College in New Jersey to produce “intelligent, practical farmers.” With the help of Hirsch funds, Sam Schatz bought a dirt farm in Fitchville, Connecticut, joining other Jewish settlers in small communities across the state. On most of these farms the soil was poor, exhausted by Yankee farmers who had abandoned it to move west or, in some cases, for better jobs in the cities.

  The Schatzes were the first Jewish family at Bird’s Eye View Farm, a stone house, two wooden barns, and a manure pit built on a rise known as Cannonball Hill. The family scratched a living from a dozen milk cows and some chickens. They sold vegetables in the spring, and in the summer they took in boarders from the city. While the urban renters lived in the farmhouse and enjoyed the great outdoors, the Schatz family lived in tents. Julius joined the U.S. Army in World War One, and after he returned, he was delivering vegetables by horse cart to nearby Norwich one day when he met a pretty, dark-haired young woman named Rachel Martin who worked in a bakery. They soon married. Her parents were Jewish immigrants from Poland who had come to America via Britain.

  On February 2, 1920, Albert Schatz was born in a Norwich hospital. The family stayed on the farm until he was three, when they moved to Passaic, New Jersey, where Julius’s sister Rebecca and her husband, Abe, had a grocery store. They lived in a wooden three-story house with six apartments, three at the front and three at the back. Two girls were born, and the family moved back and forth from Passaic to the farm, wherever there was work. As soon as he was able, Albert helped out on the farm. He learned how to sharpen farm tools, milk cows, make butter and cheese, and drive the horse cart. When he was older, he shot groundhogs, mended his own clothes, and darned his socks. He attended the local one-room school-house, which had one teacher and twenty students, grades one through eight. The building was twenty by twenty-five feet and had two entrances, one for boys and one for girls. Albert wanted to be a farmer, like his father and grandfather.

  During the Great Depression the family lived mostly in Passaic. They joined other immigrants from Eastern Europe—Hungarians, Czechs, Poles, and Russians. Albert witnessed much poverty and sickness, people fighting for scraps on the garbage dumps and dying from infectious diseases, like pneumonia, diphtheria, and, of course, tuberculosis. It was a raw and sometimes violent period. One of the young boy’s lasting memories was of the bloody police charges that ended the fourteen-month-long Passaic textile workers’ strike involving fifteen thousand workers, in 1926–27. The police dispersed the strikers with horses and water cannons, and schools were often closed. Despite the disruptions, Albert managed to stay in classes and was a consistently promising student at Passaic High School.

  Albert Schatz, age twelve, with his mother, sisters Sheila and Elaine, and his maternal grandmother on the Connecticut farm in 1932.

  (Courtesy Vivian Schatz)

  In his junior year, in 1936, when he was sixteen, he contributed three paragraphs to the school newspaper about his “life’s ambition,” to be a farmer. He did not seek wealth “for I should not know what to do with it.” He wanted to “sweat by honest labor” and to “roam the open fields.” He wanted to chop wood until his muscles ached. “I want to LIVE.”

  Aged eighteen, Albert won a scholarship to the Rutgers’ College of Agriculture, the first in his family ever to attend an institution of higher learning. In his second year, he wa
s elected to Phi Beta Kappa, a rare achievement for an “aggie.” The head of the Department of Soil Microbiology, Dr. Waksman, was another Jewish immigrant of Russian descent. He was always on the lookout for bright young graduates, and was happy to accept Albert as a Ph.D. candidate.

  SELMAN ABRAHAM WAKSMAN, the man behind the intense wartime hunt for antibiotics at Rutgers, was no ordinary soil scientist. Like the Schatz family, Waksman had arrived in America at the beginning of the twentieth century, but he came from a different social order and had achieved much in the New World.

  He was born on July 8, 1888, according to the old Russian calendar, in the small market town of Novaya Priluka, in western Ukraine, two hundred miles from the regional capital of Kiev. He wrote in his memoir that it was “a mere dot in the boundless steppes,” surrounded by chernozem, the fertile black earth on which wheat, rye, barley, and oats flourished, as long as the rains came. Without them, famine swept the land. The inhabitants of the small towns and villages of Western Ukraine were recently freed serfs who scratched a living from smallholdings, and Jewish artisans and tradesman who marketed the farm and forest products.

  His life there was simple, but not uncomfortable. His father was the relatively well-off son of a coppersmith and had inherited property. His mother was the daughter of a successful businesswoman who ran a dry goods store, a “prominent merchant in the community.” His mother had inherited the store, and together his parents were able to pay for Selman’s private tutors.

  Immediately after marriage, his father had been drafted, like all able-bodied men, into the czar’s army for five years, leaving Selman’s mother to carry on her business and fend for herself. When his father had returned from service, Selman had been born, but his father showed little interest in being with his son, most of the time living twenty miles away in the nearest large city, Vinnitsa, where he had inherited property. Selman was brought up by his mother, several aunts and maiden cousins, and his maternal grandmother, who had eight daughters. Selman was the son of the youngest daughter. Inevitably, he was spoiled.