Experiment Eleven Read online

  His mother taught him to read and sent him to the local heder (private school) and then to private tutors. She also made sure that he studied the Bible and the Talmud. The young Selman quickly learned Hebrew and Russian literature, history, and geography. And he was frequently picked as the one to read a chapter from the Bible or deliver the blessing on the initiate at a bar mitzvah.

  Jews and Ukrainians lived side by side in Novaya Priluka. The Waksmans lived in the wealthier part of town. His mother gave birth to a daughter when Selman was seven, but the daughter died less than two years later of diphtheria.

  In the Waksman household there was usually money left over to help a needy niece or nephew, or the less fortunate on the town’s poorer side. Encouraged by his mother, Selman gave free lessons in Hebrew and Russian, and later private lessons to the sons of the wealthier inhabitants and the richer peasants.

  The first Russian uprising of 1904–05 did not affect little Novaya Priluka, but revolution was in the air. Selman’s friends were divided on the future. One believed that socialism was inevitable, and another, the Zionists, looked for salvation in a new homeland in Palestine. Selman was uncommitted, with divided sympathies—on the fringe of the two groups. Instinctively, he favored the revolutionaries, but he disliked the fierce arguments over the form of a future government, should a revolution be successful. He was more interested in pursuing a higher education, but the way was blocked because he was a Jew. He could not enter the gymnasium or go on to university without passing a special competitive exam.

  In 1908, he left with four friends for Odessa to be coached, at a price, for the crucial exam. He passed “with flying colors” and returned home a hero now set to attend university in Odessa. But suddenly he suffered a terrible blow. In the summer of 1909, his mother died of an intestinal blockage. During the seven days of mourning, he read and reread the Bible, “perhaps for the last time.”

  He returned to Odessa to find new political barriers. Candidates for the university had to have been born in Odessa or have spent the last twenty years there. Selman managed to bribe a government official to give him the necessary papers, but when his friends were refused admission, they all decided to leave Russia for good. He thought briefly of going to Switzerland, a destination favored by his father, but his cousins in Philadelphia, having heard of his mother’s death, urged him to join them.

  In October 1910, Selman and a group of five young people from Novaya Priluka, three men and two women, left by train for Bremen, and thence for America. They landed in Philadelphia on November 2.

  BY THE BEGINNING of the twentieth century more than three million Russians had immigrated to the United States. Waksman, now aged twenty-two, went to work on his cousin’s five-acre farm near Metuchen, New Jersey, thirty miles from New York City. He helped with the hens, learned how to make compost from stable manures, and planted vegetables in the spring for local markets. His cousin was a great teacher, and at the end of his first year Waksman published an article in the Rural New Yorker titled “How I Raised a Flock of Chickens,” for which he was paid his first ten dollars.

  Selman Waksman as he was about to leave Russia in 1910. (Special Collections and University Archives, Rutgers University Libraries)

  But his goal was college. He thought of becoming a doctor, and was accepted at Columbia University medical school. Another cousin, who was a dentist, offered to help with the fees, but Waksman did not want to be tied down by debt.

  So he had to take what was available, and in those days the most accessible institutions were the land grant colleges. These were created by the Morrill Act of 1862, which gave states land grants to fund public agricultural and engineering colleges. One of the first such establishments was at Rutgers College, established originally as Queen’s College in 1766 and still a small institution at the turn of the twentieth century.

  Rutgers was only eight miles from Metuchen, and Waksman’s farmer cousin suggested he should go and see Jacob Lipman, another Russian immigrant, who was then head of the Department of Bacteriology. By 1911, Lipman was an established figure in soil science, having made his reputation on studies of bacteria that make nitrogen available for crops.

  Waksman was persuaded that a course in agriculture would satisfy his curiosity about the biochemistry of living organisms, plus he was awarded a full scholarship. Aged twenty-three, he found it hard, at first, to be among much younger boys of seventeen, who teased him for his clumsy English and dislike of sports. He also found the level of teaching poor. In his sophomore year, his chemistry professor was “an unimaginative bore,” physics was “a great disappointment,” he found the courses on American and English literature uninteresting, and he disliked Shakespeare. The French teacher was enthusiastic, but he felt he already had enough knowledge of foreign languages. The only courses that earned his approval were zoology and botany.

  At the end of his second year, he yearned for independence and moved into a room in an old house on the college farm, paying for his accommodation by working in the college greenhouse and helping out in the laboratory. He bought cracked eggs from the Poultry Department at eleven cents a dozen.

  Another and more important reason for striking out on his own was the arrival in New York from Novaya Priluka of a young woman named Deborah Mitnick. The daughter of a prosperous grain merchant, she was the sister of Waksman’s best friend, Peisi, back in Ukraine, and after finishing grade school she had come to stay with her cousins, braving the voyage from Riga on her own in the middle of winter. She was good looking, bright, and energetic. In America, she quickly joined Peisi in New York—he had come to America with Waksman, in 1910. She worked in a sweatshop, became a member of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, and took singing lessons. She was affectionately known as Bobili, Russian for young grandmother, a nickname given in the hope that she would reach a ripe old age. Waksman had been her tutor in Novaya Priluka, had always admired her, and planned to marry her.

  In his studies, Waksman had at last found a subject that interested him: general bacteriology under Dr. Lipman. “I felt that I was finally under the tutelage of a master,” he wrote. Waksman was the only student majoring in soil microbiology. For his senior thesis he listed the different groups of microbes—bacteria and fungi—but he was fascinated by the actinomycetes. He dug trenches on the college farm and mapped the different horizons of the microbes he found in the soil. He took samples from each layer, suspended them in water, put the microbes on petri dishes of nutrient agar, let them grow for a week, and then counted the different colonies that had developed.

  The actinomycetes, hardly noticed in America, had been known for more than forty years in Europe, having first been described by German researchers as a microbe responsible for a disease in cattle known as “lumpy jaw,” literally lumps on the animal’s cheek containing a growth of the microbe. Russian researchers had also published papers on the actinomycetes, and Waksman had a distinct advantage over his colleagues because he could read German and Russian. He cataloged the different species and played an important role in their early classification into five genera, depending on a microscopic examination of the degree of branching of the cells, whether they produced spores in chains or singly on stalks, and whether they could live with or without oxygen. Thus, as Waksman would write forty years later, began his interest “in a group of microbes to which I was later to devote much of my time and which were to remain for the rest of my life as my major scientific interest.”

  He was elected to the scholastic fraternity Phi Beta Kappa, and on his graduation in 1915, Lipman offered him a job as a research assistant in soil microbiology and a stipend of fifty dollars a month, which in those days meant he could continue to live comfortably in his room in the farmhouse and study for his master’s degree.

  By the end of 1915, he had written his first academic paper on bacteria, actinomycetes, and fungi in the soil. He was twenty-seven. The paper was published in February 1916, the year he became an American c
itizen and the year he married Deborah “Bobili” Mitnick.

  Selman Waksman married Deborah Mitnick, his childhood sweetheart, in 1916. (Special Collections and Archives, Rutgers University Libraries)

  “I had sent my roots into the soil in search of its microbiological population,” he later wrote. “I was now on my way. I knew now exactly what I wanted and how to get it. The rest was merely to follow a plan. California was to prove whether I was on the right track.”

  The new couple moved to the University of California at Berkeley, where Waksman studied for two years for his doctorate on the enzymes produced by microbes, mostly the actinomycetes. During his last year he supplemented his income by working at Cutter Laboratories, a local commercial laboratory producing antitoxins and vaccines against bacterial infections. It was the start of a lifelong connection between his research as a microbiologist and industry.

  3 • The Good Earth

  IN THE SUMMER OF 1918, AS World War One was drawing to a close, Waksman returned to Rutgers to take up a new position as the farm college “Microbiologist.” His somewhat mundane task was to continue the search for microorganisms that would produce more fertile soils, but he insisted on the rather grand title, with a capital M, as a mark of the importance he attached to the emerging science, and his own place in it.

  The war had taken its toll, even on the quiet backwater of the New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station. There were no graduate students and no lab assistants in the Department of Soil Microbiology. Waksman found the laboratory benches covered with dirty petri dishes, and the cultures of fungi and actinomycetes he had put into the culture collection before leaving for California were either dead or in need of prolonged resuscitation.

  The sorry state of the laboratories reflected the scarcity of funds. His mentor, Dr. Lipman, could offer him only one day a week and fifteen hundred dollars a year, less than he had been getting as a part-time bacteriologist in the Cutter Laboratories in California. Personally, he had no funds in reserve, and he was forced to look for another part-time job in industry to supplement his income. It did not present a problem.

  Before the war, America had been dependent on Germany for supplies of chemicals, laboratory glassware, and even scientific literature, but was gradually severing these ties and establishing its own infrastructure of scientific research. Waksman was now a bacteriologist and a biochemist, a good combination for employment amid the expansion of microbial research after the war. The brewery and food industries were studying yeasts and cheese-producing molds, public health officials were looking at new ways to use microbes in sewage disposal, and drug companies were beefing up their research into medicines to cure infections. In agriculture, researchers concentrated on identifying soil-enriching microbes to grow bigger and better crops.

  This bustling activity was a natural progression of the work of the nineteenth-century European pioneers of bacteriology—Louis Pasteur, who first formulated the germ theory of disease, and the German bacteriologist Robert Koch, who discovered the TB microbe. On the eve of World War One, German researchers had found a new purpose for the dyes that had been used to identify bacterial cells under the microscope. In 1910, a young German chemist, Paul Ehrlich, and his Japanese assistant, Sahachiro Hata, found an arsenic-based dye that worked against the syphilis microbe. They named it salvarsan, and it became the first of the so-called magic bullets that would cure bacterial infections.

  From among the many companies making offers, Waksman chose the Takamine Laboratory, in nearby Clifton, New Jersey, one of the more successful of the new companies producing antibacterial products, including salvarsan. Waksman’s job was simple enough for a postgraduate biochemist—he had to test each batch of salvarsan for toxicity to human cells. He was paid good money for those days, forty-five hundred dollars a year, and the company was close enough to Rutgers for him to combine his work with a day a week at the college. The money even allowed him to move into Manhattan, where his wife, Bobili, could enjoy the music, theater, and culture missing in rural New Jersey.

  Over the next two years, Waksman was exposed to much more than how to test a drug for toxicity. The Takamine Laboratory produced and marketed adrenaline, a natural product of animal adrenal glands. His experience “suggested the possibility” of finding other useful natural products—perhaps even among his favorite microbes, the actinomycetes.

  Waksman was a rising star in microbiology at a time when researchers were focusing on a ghoulish question. What became of all the microbes that caused deadly diseases—typhoid, dysentery, cholera, diphtheria, pneumonia, bubonic plague, and tuberculosis—when a dead body was buried in the earth? When scientists searched the nearby soil, they found few of these germs, and they concluded that either the microbes could not exist in the soil, because the environment didn’t suit them, or they were consumed by predators larger than themselves, or, a far more intriguing possibility, they were destroyed by other microbes.

  In London at the turn of the twentieth century, researchers found that the cholera bacterium, Vibrio cholerae, survived in clean, deep water but not in surface water containing microbes present in the air. Cholera bacteria disappeared quickly, in a matter of hours, in sewage sludge, and also in seawater. E. coli was rapidly crowded out in manure piles teeming with other species of microbes. On these microbe battlefields, researchers in Europe and Australia found actinomycetes to be active warriors, but Waksman was reluctant to become involved. He had no medical training and preferred to concentrate on microbes that were useful in agriculture.

  When finances at Rutgers improved in the early 1920s, Waksman became a full-time assistant professor in his chosen pursuit—the microbiology of the soil. The condition of his labs was still pitiful, and he complained to Dr. Lipman. The division of soil chemistry had only two workers but had “three laboratories and three large closets,” and his division, soil microbiology, “had four workers and only one laboratory.” Recent alterations to the Administration Building had not included painting his walls, which “absolutely demoralizes the assistants and discourages the workers,” he wrote to Lipman.

  In 1923, Waksman and his graduate assistant, Robert Starkey, saw actinomycetes producing clear zones when matched against other bacteria. “A zone is found free from fungus and bacterial growth,” their joint paper concluded, and “numerous” microbes, including bacteria, fungi, and actinomycetes, “bring about injurious or destructive effects upon themselves or upon other soil organisms.” But Waksman was interested only in the effects on the fertility of the soil. He did not link this strange activity to the possibility of curing human infectious diseases. “Unfortunately our own observations on the growth inhibiting effect of actinomycetes upon other microbes were not pursued further at that time,” he later wrote.

  In 1924, Waksman took six months off from Rutgers to go to Europe on a “grand scientific tour” with his wife and their four-year-old son, Byron. It was the first of five European tours that he would make with his wife before the outbreak of World War Two. In 1924, the main attraction was a conference on soil science in Rome organized by Jacob Lipman, who allowed Waksman to continue to be paid his small Rutgers salary but gave him no expenses for the trip. Despite his tight budget, Waksman packed in a hectic schedule of visits to major soil microbiology laboratories in Britain, France, Germany, Sweden, and Holland. In Paris he met and struck up a thirty-year friendship with the Russian pioneer of soil microbiology, Sergei Winogradsky, now an émigré in Paris. And in Holland he visited Martinus Beijernick, who made his reputation by discovering viruses in 1898 and went on to find bacteria that make nitrogen available to plants. According to Waksman, Beijernick greeted him with the words “You are the actinomyces man.” Waksman also went to Moscow and even his hometown, Novaya Priluka, in Ukraine. There he witnessed the ravages of the revolution and the civil war and saw again the little house where he was born. “It looked like a hole of a troglodyte,” he wrote later. He returned to America determined to write source books to fill t
he gaps in the literature of soil science.

  “I was primarily a soil microbiologist,” he wrote, “studying soils and composts, peat bogs and manure piles ... concerned with products of microbes that are used in green plants.” He “scarcely dreamed of becoming profoundly involved in problems dealing with human health.” He was “too busy completing [his] work on the distribution of different groups of microorganism in the soil, their role in the decomposition of organic matter and formation of humus.” His studies resulted in several major works that said almost nothing about the possible medical application of his fighting microbes.

  In a 360-page book, Enzymes, published in 1926, he devoted only one paragraph to antagonistic bacteria. In his 894-page tome The Principles of Soil Microbiology, he wrote only two pages on “antagonism and symbiosis among microorganisms.” On another page, he mentioned the “inhibitive effects” of fungi and actinomycetes. In a smaller book, The Soil and the Microbe, written with Starkey, now Waksman’s deputy, in 1931, they discussed the role of microbes in the life cycle of soil organisms. But he wrote only one sentence about bacteria fighting among themselves.

  In his lectures and scientific papers, he would remind his students and readers that the soil was a complex system, our knowledge of it limited, our methods crude, and we were still unable to understand how it works. In the basement lab, his students followed “a semi-military regime,” often working weekends during the depression years because they had no money to spend. They wrote brief descriptions of each day’s projects in five-by-seven-inch lab notebooks, which Waksman reviewed at the beginning of each week. One student recalled what was known as the “book parade.” “Waksman would spot Harry and say, ‘Let me see your book.’ Waksman would glance at it and add, ‘Tell Dave to bring his book.’ Harry, disarmed, would go down to the basement lab and pass the word. Dave would submit his book and come back to order another student up to the office. The books were returned when Waksman spotted an error, or something unclear, but he never accused anyone of being a slob and all partings were amiable. The book parade seemed to me a little Teutonic.” Waksman rarely visited his students in the basement lab, even then. But once a year he held a spring cleaning, which he obviously enjoyed. All drawers and cabinets had to be open for inspection, and Waksman would walk in followed by his assistant, who carried a laundry basket. The student wrote, “If he found equipment lying on the bench, or chipped, or unlabelled, he would say, ‘Vat’s this for?’ in his Russian accent (which he never lost) and if there was any doubt, he would tell his assistant, ‘Throw it in the basket.’”