Experiment Eleven Read online

  Feldman and Hinshaw refused to talk to newspapers about the results unless they were allowed to check and edit the story. Reporters also had to clear their copy with the Minnesota State Medical Association’s Committee on Tuberculosis. The newspapers cooperated. Feldman and Hinshaw were equally cautious in articles published in medical journals, avoiding overly optimistic statements that might mislead the medical profession. They pointed out that extensive and prolonged clinical investigation would be required to determine the place of streptomycin in the treatment of TB.

  On January 20, 1945, however, the successful end of the third and largest guinea pig trial was a real cause for celebration. Feldman cabled Waksman, “Long term crucial experiment streptomycin terminated today. Incomplete results indicate impressive therapeutic effects.” In a follow-up letter, Hinshaw wrote, “The results are sufficiently encouraging to be tantalizing ... If we could give a million or more units a day we might have something more impressive.”

  Also at the end of January the Mayo researchers completed the first clinical trials on patients from the Mineral Springs Sanatorium. They reported a total of fifty-four cases of TB in which the patients had received streptomycin for a period in excess of four weeks, and the number of cases had increased to seventy-five by June. For the first time, they found some toxicity affecting the eighth cranial nerve, resulting in some dizziness. It was a small note of caution in an otherwise optimistic report.

  The U.S. government prepared to set up a distribution network similar to the one used for penicillin, so that limited supplies would go to the army first. Merck sent small quantities to the Army Medical Corps, the U.S. biological warfare program at Fort Detrick, and the British chemical and biological warfare establishment at Porton Down, in Wiltshire, where they were testing streptomycin against an array of toxins. The official view was still cautious. Norman Kirk, the U.S. surgeon general, warned that “no conclusive statements” could yet be made as to the drug’s potential because it was in such short supply.

  A team of fifty Merck scientists was assigned at once to do everything possible to transform streptomycin from an extremely promising experiment into a therapeutic agent ready for use by doctors around the world. Merck broke ground on a $3.5 million plant, slated to employ four hundred workers, in Elkton, Virginia. On February 8, 1945, Merck lawyers filed the patent application papers of Selman Waksman and Albert Schatz for “Streptomycin and Process of Preparation.” The application included an oath, sworn by Waksman and Schatz, that “they verily believed themselves to be the original, first and joint inventors” of streptomycin, plus an affidavit of Waksman’s describing streptomycin as “the new antibiotic that Schatz and I have discovered.”

  PART II • The Rift

  8 • The Lilac Gardens

  AT THE BEGINNING OF 1945, AS the Allied armies in Europe prepared for the final push to Berlin, Albert Schatz was about to turn twenty-five. He planned to mark his surprising yet spectacular contribution to the war effort with a rare personal celebration. He was going to marry Vivian Rosenfeld, a bright, pretty, blue-eyed student with long dark curly hair who was studying biology at the New Jersey College for Women, on the Rutgers campus.

  He had met her by chance a year earlier. He was spending such long hours in the basement laboratory that he rarely had time to make friends with eligible young women, even though the Women’s College was a five-minute walk from his laboratory. Biology students like Vivian often saw Albert in his white lab coat when they came to mycology lectures in the Administration Building. They noticed his good looks, and they heard from the other graduates about his brilliance as a researcher, but he was always working. For his part, Schatz reckoned that even if he asked any of them out, they would not really have time for him. He lived in the greenhouse and had no money to spare at the end of the month, hardly ten cents for an ice cream. Certainly he could not afford a movie. The best he could offer was a stroll across the college farmland.

  In the spring of 1944, however, he found one young student who liked to walk with him. She lived in one of the campus dormitories of the Women’s College. One evening after work, he telephoned her from the lab, but Vivian Rosenfeld answered the phone instead. The student Albert had called for was out, but Vivian said yes, she would love to go walking, if he’d accept her as a substitute. Schatz agreed, and they set off for the Lilac Gardens, an area of woodland reserved for ornamental plants about two miles beyond Poultry Pathology and the milking shed.

  That evening began a friendship, and soon followed love, which lasted for the next six decades. They swapped family histories. Vivian’s grandparents were refugees from Ukraine, like Waksman. They had arrived in Philadelphia with no knowledge of English. Albert’s back problems for once were not bothering him, and he made Vivian laugh by hanging on to a post and stretching his legs horizontal to the ground. And Vivian impressed him with her determined strides; fit as he was now, he had trouble keeping up with her.

  It was the first of many walks around the farm, each season providing its own natural attractions. In summer they looked for wildflowers, and in the fall they picked mushrooms. They were especially drawn to the slime molds, the unfortunate nickname for a gelatinous microbe, in unusual browns and yellows, commonly found attached to the underside of deciduous logs on the forest floor.

  As the friendship developed, Vivian would come over to the basement laboratory after hours and knock on the window. Albert would let her in, and she would do her homework while he attended to his experiments, producing crude extracts of streptomycin. On Saturday nights in winter, when it was too cold to go walking, they stayed in the basement lab, going through Albert’s slides, identifying various species of fungi and bacteria. It was an odd courtship, but it suited them perfectly.

  Albert and Vivian on one of their walks in the Lilac Gardens at Rutgers. (Courtesy Vivian Schatz)

  The couple married on March 23, 1945, in a synagogue in Passaic, and left immediately for their honeymoon in Connecticut. Albert wanted to show Vivian the farm where he had spent his childhood, near Norwich. It was the first week’s holiday he had taken since he had come back from the army two years earlier, and he couldn’t leave his work and Dr. Waksman behind. In his shirt pocket were four test tubes with white cotton wool stoppers containing A. lavendulae, the bacterium that produces streptothricin. A week was too long to leave them unobserved, he explained, and Vivian wondered whether there had ever been another man who took test tubes of multiplying microbes on his honeymoon.

  One morning, without telling Vivian, Albert even took time to write a letter to Waksman. He and Vivian had found the largest bracket fungus he had ever seen and carried it three miles back to the hotel, he wrote. “Each morning and night Vivian and I examine the four agar slants of the different colony isolates of A. lavendulae. Vivian says it’s strange to have ‘business’ with us now, but she is as interested in the cultures as I am.” Surely, this was true love.

  BACK AT WORK the next week, they moved into a small apartment that they shared with another graduate student, and Schatz finished his thesis. Titled “Streptomycin: An Antibiotic Agent Produced by Actinomyces Griseus,” it was approved for a doctorate on June 15—two years to the day after he had been discharged from the army. The normal residency requirement of three years was waived. The war in Europe was over, but lack of funds and shortages of everyday supplies at Rutgers meant that the 127-page thesis in which he had described each step of the discovery of streptomycin was not printed. The only copies available were carbons from the department’s typist. Schatz signed one “To Uncle Joe from Albert,” for his mother’s brother.

  The acknowledgments were generous. As he was bound to do, he thanked everybody involved, starting with “Dr. S. A. Waksman for suggesting the problem investigated and for his close supervision and encouragement throughout the course of this work.” He also thanked Robert Starkey and Walton Geiger, the department’s chemist, “for their interest and helpful advice,” and his colleagues in the depart
ment for their “friendly cooperation.”

  The text mentioned that one of the strains had come from the swab of a chicken’s throat, and Schatz’s notebook made two references to the culture’s having come from Doris Jones. He had written Jones into the history books. A final note said, “For the sake of completeness in the treatment of subject matter, a few experiments carried out in collaboration with Miss Elizabeth Bugie and Miss H. Christine Reilly have been included.” Waksman was, of course, one of the examiners of his thesis, but there is no record of his making any comment.

  Schatz thought that his thesis was the document which the outside world would rely on for evidence that he was the one who had actually discovered streptomycin, and he thought that his name coming first on the two key scientific papers written up from his thesis would support that claim, but he was in for a shock.

  While Schatz was working in his basement laboratory, Dr. Waksman was upstairs in his office writing up his own account of the discovery. In March 1945, he published his first book on microbe wars, a masterly 350-page compilation of scientific papers going back to the first 1890 experiments with actinomycetes and forward to Schatz’s discovery of streptomycin. The book, Microbial Antagonisms and Antibiotic Substances, described Schatz’s discovery as follows: “Certain strains of Streptomyces griseus produce an antibiotic substance, designated streptomycin, that is also active against both Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria.” Because of its low toxicity it had “great promise of practical application.” (In 1943, Waksman and a colleague reclassified the actinomycetes. A. griseus was put into a new genera, Streptomyces. Thus, Schatz’s A. griseus may now appear as S. griseus, depending on the original text.) The name Albert Schatz did not appear in the book, only in the bibliography.

  With the book’s publication, Waksman began to give interviews to the popular media, portraying himself as the “discoverer” of streptomycin and Schatz as “one of his assistants.” A breathless account in Liberty Magazine titled “Keep Your Eye on Streptomycin” was a “preliminary report on what is potentially the biggest medical news since penicillin ... Streptomycin appears to open the way to the conquest of all infectious diseases ... Potentially, swift cures for everything from watermelon wilt to infantile paralysis lie hidden in the grubby soil.”

  Streptomycin was also said to be effective against undulant fever, which under the name of Bang’s disease cost cattle breeders $30 million a year. Nearly two thousand cases a year in the United States of the sometimes fatal tularemia might be cured with streptomycin. There appeared to be an excellent chance that streptomycin would be an unparalleled weapon against plague and leprosy, hog cholera and Dutch elm disease. But “its greatest, most exhilarating accomplishment is its action against the tubercle bacillus, which causes tuberculosis.”

  IF SCHATZ SUBMITTED to this loss of stature, his parents and especially his mother’s brother, Uncle Joe, were outraged to find him relegated to the level of an assistant to the “discoverer,” Waksman. Uncle Joe had recently qualified as a dentist and, being of the kind known disparagingly in the profession as “an advertising dentist,” understood a thing or two about publicity. Although he never took credit for what happened next, the front-page headline on the July 2 issue of the Schatz family’s local paper, the Passaic Herald-News, declared, PASSAIC YOUTH DISCOVERS DRUG THAT MAY STAMP OUT DREAD TB. A reporter had visited the Schatz family at home and found “a slim youth of 25, a product of Passaic’s public schools and now engaged in research in soil microbiology,” who was “on his way toward startling the world of medical science with a drug more wonderful than penicillin.” For Schatz “and those associated with him” it had meant “hours, days, and months of tedious, painstaking and oft-times discouraging laboratory work.”

  The entire family had gathered for the interview. Albert’s father, Julius, a housepainter and part-time dirt farmer, was “proud” of his son and could discuss “the intricacies of soil microbiology with the fluidity of a scientist.” Julius told the reporter, “To think when he was a little shaver I had to go out searching for him every time a steam shovel came within two miles of our home. I was almost sure he would turn out to be a mechanic.”

  Albert’s “young looking” mother, Rachel, “delicately hinted at items her son was too modest to mention.” His older sister, Elaine, aged sixteen and now a nurse, was “trim and nice-looking,” and his youngest sister, thirteen-year-old Sheila, was “determined to become her brother’s assistant when she ‘grows up.’”

  The modest Albert, whose “eyes brighten with enthusiasm and hope” at the mention of streptomycin, had done his work “under Dr. Selman A. Waksman at the New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station.” Waksman was the director of the lab, the assigner of the task; the article did not mention him in any other role. If Waksman heard about the article, he didn’t mention it.

  A month later, Collier’s, another popular magazine, ran a big feature on streptomycin, titled “Magic Germ Killer.” “Streptomycin, made from a common earth mold, is the newest, safest miracle drug, effective against diseases which penicillin won’t touch,” the article began. There was a large photo of Waksman in his white coat at the lab bench with “his assistant Dr. Schatz” just visible behind him. When the present hunt for new antibiotics had started, the article said, the first ones discovered had all been too toxic. “Bacteriologists were wringing their hands with frustration” when Dr. Waksman spoke up about a formidable bacteria killer he had discovered and reported on twenty-nine years ago in the course of soil experiments. He called it streptomycin. “In three months—overnight in medical circles—bacteriologists were predicting that the drug would be as great as penicillin.” There is no evidence that Waksman moved to curb the writer’s extravagant claims in his behalf. For the time being, Schatz held his own in the trade press, however. The November 1945 issue of the Journal of the American Pharmaceutical Association included a thirteen-page review of streptomycin by Selman Waksman and Albert Schatz that listed them as codiscoverers, but with Waksman’s name first.

  Meanwhile, streptomycin was on its way to market. By the end of the year, it had moved to number three among the top ten science advances for 1945, after the atomic bomb and the large-scale production of plutonium for use in the bomb.

  IN THE FALL of 1945, Waksman launched a new project in Poultry Pathology to find an antibiotic that would destroy viral diseases found in chickens. In the “gold rush” unleashed by streptomycin, the hunt was on to find antibiotics for any of the incurable diseases, including cancer. Waksman put Schatz and his friend Doris Jones in charge of the research. Jones had received her M.A. in July after completing the first in vivo work on streptomycin. They both knew that the chances of finding a new miracle cure for viruses—the cause of diseases such as smallpox, chicken pox, mumps, yellow fever, influenza, and the common cold—were even slimmer than the. 1 percent chance of Schatz’s finding streptomycin. He and Jones were even moved into a different building. With increasing dismay, Schatz would see his image of himself as the discoverer of streptomycin gradually fading as Waksman assumed the starring role.

  9 • The Parable of the Sick Chicken

  IT IS DIFFICULT TO SAY EXACTLY when Selman Waksman decided to rewrite the story of the discovery of streptomycin, but several strange events occurred in the Department of Soil Microbiology in the spring of 1946. Put together, they provide evidence that Waksman indeed had a deliberate strategy to downplay Albert Schatz’s role, and when confronted with this charge, he did not deny it.

  Looking back many years later, Waksman would describe 1946 as the year “things began to happen.” And Schatz would say it was the year he “really began to feel uneasy” about how Waksman was handling the intense publicity that streptomycin was attracting. Certainly, Waksman and Schatz set out on a collision course, which would turn the mutual admiration they had for each other, and the exhilaration of the discovery, into anguish and despair for both men.

  FREE OF THE patent commitment to Merck, Ru
tgers set up a new trust, the Rutgers Research and Endowment Foundation (RREF), to hold patents taken out by Rutgers staff. Rights to manufacture patented goods would be leased to companies in return for a royalty of 2.5 percent. Rutgers considered that it now owned the patents on the drugs being produced by Waksman’s department and wanted Waksman to assign to the foundation “all improvements and future inventions.” In return, the university agreed to pay him a percentage of the royalties received. There was no question of paying the graduate “assistants” who were named as codiscoverers on the patents, Boyd Woodruff for actinomycin and streptothricin and Schatz for streptomycin. It was simply assumed that because of their rank they would accept the assignment of their patents to the new foundation, and indeed, that was the protocol of the time.

  Waksman was keen to do more than merely accept money. He offered to act as the manager of the patents, taking inquiries from interested companies both in the United States and abroad. Initially, Rutgers offered Waksman 15 percent of the net royalties received, after the legal and other expenses, a deal that was in line with other university patent agreements. But Waksman drove a hard bargain. In the final draft the figure “15 percent” was crossed out and replaced with “20”—the 5 percent being agreed on for the extra burden of work. He also protested the clause that included all his future inventions, and the clause was dropped.

  Before they could execute the agreement for streptomycin, however, Waksman had to persuade Schatz to give up his rights to the patent, and this proved more difficult than Waksman had anticipated. On May 3, 1946, Waksman called Schatz into his office and asked him to sign the necessary papers, but Schatz hesitated. Why were they patenting a drug so badly needed by mankind? he asked. Waksman told him that assigning the patent was routine. Others had done it—Woodruff had done it for actinomycin and streptothricin. In fact, under the old deal, Woodruff had assigned his share of those patents to Merck—for whom he now worked.