THE TRUE STORY OF THE DISCOVERY OF STREPTOMYCIN
ALBERT SCHATZ
6907 Sherman Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19119, USA
Code Number: AC93005
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Prologue
"For the historian of science, few documents are as
valuable as the description of a discovery by the scientists
involved in the action. Unfortunately few scientists take the time
to record for posterity the course of events which led to the
discoveries which were the fruit of their labor" (Lechevalier,
1991).
"I have often thought how much more interesting science
would be if those who created it told how it really happened,
rather than reported it logically and impersonally, as they often
do in scientific papers" (Beadle, 1992).
"Over the years, the story of streptomycin's discovery has
been terribly garbled. I think ... it would be a great service if
... Dr.Schatz told his own accurate and interesting account of his
finding. Streptomycin turned out to be a milestone in the history
of drugs to treat tuberculosis and other infections. Dr. Schatz's
role has been largely ignored. The record about this discovery
should be set straight"
(Doris Jones Ralston, a fellow graduate student when I did the
streptomycin research).
The Story of the Sick Chicken
This year, 1993, is the 50th anniversary of the discovery of
streptomycin. It was on October 19,1943, at about 2:00 in the
afternoon, that I realized I had found a new antibiotic. The report
of its discovery was published in January of 1944 (Schatz et
al., 1944). But I prefer to begin this story of the discovery
of streptomycin with a 50-year-old fairy tale about a sick chicken.
That fictitious account of the discovery of streptomycin recently
appeared as follows in the Smithsonian magazine (Chowder,
1992).
"A New Jersey farmer was upset: his chickens were catching
a strange infection from barnyard dirt. He took the bird s to the
Rutgers University laboratory of microbiologist Selman Waksman, who
analyzed the barnyard soil and isolated the problem - a peculiar
fungus. In the process, Waksman fortuitously discovered that the
microorganism had properties besides the ability to make chickens
sick. The fungus produced a chemical agent that slowed the growth
of certain bacteria".
The Rutgers Magazine also recently retold this myth
(Smolen, 1992). These accounts egregiously distort and misrepresent
the circumstances involved in the discovery of streptomycin. I want
to present the true story of the discovery of
streptomycin which I am uniquely qualified to do because I
literally lived it! I began the research that led to streptomycin
when I was in the army during world War II.
How And Where It All Began
In May, 1942, I graduated from Rutgers University with a major
in Soil Science. The day after I received my Bachelor of Science
degree, I became a student again. But this time I was a graduate
student who wanted a Ph.D. degree. I worked for six months in
Selman Waksman's Department of Soil Microbiology at Rutgers
University on the production of fumaric acid and three antibiotics:
actinomycin, clavacin and streptothricin. Unfortunately, these
antibiotics were too toxic to have practical value in treating
human infectious diseases. Nevertheless, this work gave me an
introduction to the field of antibiotics.
World War II interrupted the lives of many students. In
November, 1942, I became a bacteriologist in the Medical Detachment
of the Air Force, and was stationed in army hospitals in Florida.
This experience provided me with firsthand knowledge of the
inability, at that time, to control many infectious diseases. Sulfa
drugs were useful in some cases but had serious limitations. The
antibiotics tyrothricin, gramicidin and tyrocidin could be applied
topically, but were too toxic for systemic use. Penicillin was a
new antibiotic that was active against gram-positive bacteria.
There was no means of effectively controlling tuberculosis and
infections caused by gram-negative bacteria. I therefore began
devoting my spare time, when I was off duty, to a search for an
antibiotic that would be effective against gram-negative bacteria.
For this purpose, I isolated and tested molds and actinomycetes
from contaminated blood culture plates and from Florida soils,
swamps and coastal sea water. I sent Waksman cultures that I
thought merited further testing which I could not do in army
hospitals. Waksman acknowledged that I had done that work in
Florida. In his pretrial deposition (testimony under oath, in a
lawsuit that will be discussed) he stated that I had sent him
cultures from Florida (Anonymous, 1950). In a publication which he
coauthored with Elizabeth Bugie he reported that one culture, which
they tested, "was isolated by Primate A.Schatz while stationed
at the Miami Beach Military Hospital in April of 1943 from a
meningococcus blood agar plate" (Anonymous, 1950). My research
in the army was terminated when I was discharged on June 15, 1943,
due to a back injury sustained in the army.
I could then have gotten a well-paying job in a chemical or
pharmaceutical company. Instead, I chose to work for a Ph.D. degree
with an income of only $40.00 a month. I told Waksman that I wanted
to continue my search for an antibiotic against gram-negative
bacteria as my doctoral research project. Waksman agreed. He knew
this would be a continuation of the work I had been doing during my
off-duty hours in army hospitals.
Shortly thereafter, William Feldman at the Mayo Clinic
suggested to Waksman that he look for an antibiotic to treat human
tuberculosis. However, Waksman was reluctant to do that because, he
told me, he was afraid to have Mycobacterium tuberculosis
(hominis), which causes human TB, in his laboratory. When I
told him I wanted to work with that organism and include the search
for an antibiotic against tuberculosis as part of my Ph.D.
research, Waksman informed Feldman that he would take on the TB
project. I then had two problems to work on: finding an antibiotic
active against the tubercle bacillus and an antibiotic active
against gram-negative bacteria.
Waksman originally thought there was little likelihood of my
finding an antibiotic that would be effective in treating
tuberculosis because of the external waxy coating which protected
the tubercle bacillus. He also knew that tubercle bacilli got into
the soil. "It is estimated that the thirty pounds of moist feces
produced daily by the aureate cow would contain, in the case of
diseased animals, 37,000,000 microscopically demonstrable tubercle
bacilli" (Lipman, 1921). And he knew that tubercle bacilli
"survive in the soil for many years without losing their
virulence" (Waksman, 1932).
There was nothing fortuitous about the discovery of
streptomycin in the sense that the Smithsonian article
implies (Chowder, 1992). The research I did in 1943, reported in my
doctoral dissertation (Schatz, 1945) and my publications (Schatz
et al., 1944; Schatz and Waksman, 1944, 1945), was
specifically designed to achieve the two above-mentioned
objectives. The wording of these objectives in my doctoral
dissertation is: "Two problems, therefore, appeared to be of
sufficient interest to warrant investigation; namely ... a search
for an antibiotic agent possessing ... activity ... against
gram-negative eubacteria ... and a search for a specific
antimycobacterial agent" (Schatz, 1945) active against the
tubercle bacillus.
There are comments in the literature that Waksman and I did
not at first fully appreciate the importance of streptomycin. That
may have been true for Waksman, but it certainly was not true for
me. I wanted to find an antibiotic that would be effective in
treating human tuberculosis. That is why, as reported in my
doctoral dissertation (Schatz, 1945), I specifically worked with a
virulent human strain of the tubercle bacillus. It is true that I
did not point out the potential importance of streptomycin for
treating tuberculosis in the paper I wrote about streptomycin
inhibiting the tubercle bacillus in vitro (Schatz et
al.,1944). But there was insufficient information at that time
about toxicity and in vivo efficacy. I therefore did not want to
raise people's hopes with claims that might subsequently be
refuted.
Two Strains of Streptomyces griseus
I isolated two strains of Streptomyces griseus from two
separate sources. Both strains produced streptomycin. And
streptomycin was effective against both gram-negative bacteria and
the tubercle bacillus. I called one strain of S.griseus
18-16 because it was the 16th actinomycete I isolated from a
heavily manured field soil. That was the 18th soil from which I
obtained actinomycetes to test for antibiotic activity (Schatz,
1945). I isolated another strain of S.griseus from a petri
dish which my fellow graduate student Doris Jones, now Doris
Ralston, had streaked with a swab from a healthy chicken's
throat. S.griseus is an actinomycete that is widely
distributed in soils. Its spores can be blown around in the air and
inhaled by people and animals. At that time, Doris was working in
the laboratory of Frederick Beaudette, a veterinarian and poultry
pathologist in the Department of Poultry Science at the Rutgers
University College of Agriculture and the New Jersey Agricultural
Experiment Station. She was studying The Effect of
Microorganisms and Antibiotic Substances on Viruses (Jones,
1945). Doris gave me some of her petri dishes with colonies of
various microorganisms after she had made transfers from those
colonies that she wanted for her research. I called that second
isolate D-1 because it was the first (No. l) actinomycete I
isolated from the plates that Doris (D) gave me.
To eliminate any doubt about the source of the D-1 strain of
S.griseus, I am quoting the following information from Doris
Jones' master's degree dissertation. "It had been suggested by
Dr.Beaudette that the flora of carrier birds might in some way
differ from those of infected, immune and normal fowl, and that
certain microorganisms might be responsible for the reduction or
elimination of the virus. Accordingly, an attempt was made to
survey the tracheal flora of well (emphasis by A.S.)
birds with a view to comparing this with the flora of carriers
and victims of respiratory virus diseases. Over a period of several
weeks, tracheal swabs were streaked out on nutrient agar plates...
It was noted at the time that the phenomenon of microbial
antagonism occurred. Several plates exhibiting zones of antagonism
were examined by Mr.Schatz and from one of them was isolated an
active strain of S.griseus" (Jones, 1945). Waksman was chairman
of Doris Jones' graduate committee. If he had read her
dissertation, as he should have done, he would have known that the
chicken was healthy, not sick. The story about the sick chicken is
therefore a fairy tale that Waksman concocted as evidence that he
had in some way participated in the isolation of the D-l strain of
S.griseus. The sick chicken is the only link he had with the
actual discovery of streptomycin. He never saw the plates which
Doris Jones gave me. Milton Wainwright published a detailed account
of how this poor, sick chicken was created and passed around
(Wainwright, 1991).
Farmers who had sick chickens routinely took them to the
poultry pathologist, Beaudette, not to the soil microbiologist,
Waksman. The saga of the sick chicken which Waksman sired was only
the beginning of the false history of the discovery of streptomycin
that he fabricated. "Waksman once told a famous numbers story as
follows: 'We isolated one hundred thousand strains of
streptomycetes' (formerly known as actinomycetes), 'ten thousand
were active on agar media, one thousand were active in broth
culture, one hundred were active in animals, ten had activity
against experimental T.B. and one turned out to produce
streptomycin'. 'Dr.Lechevalier, who told this story in 1975, went
on to say: of course, this whole arithmetic is phony and what this
story shows is an obsession for numbers'" (Luedemann, 1991).
None of Waksman's above-mentioned comments apply to the
discovery of streptomycin. I isolated all the actinomycetes that I
tested. Waksman did not isolate a single one of them. My
streptomycin research began in late June of 1943, shortly after I
was discharged from the army. On October 19, 1943, I realized I had
found a new antibiotic, and decided to call it streptomycin. The
publication announcing the discovery of streptomycin appeared in
January, 1943. During the four month interval between June and
October, 1943, I worked day and night, and often slept in the
laboratory. I prepared my own media and washed and sterilized the
glassware I used. This work was done 50 years ago with glass petri
dishes that were reused, and test tubes with cotton plugs. I was
the first and probably the only one who ever worked with the
tubercle bacillus in Waksman's laboratory. I could not possibly
have isolated and tested 100,000 actinomycetes against the tubercle
bacillus in four months! Finally, Waksman's own writing
(Wainwright, 1991) confirms what I reported in my doctoral
dissertation (Schatz, 1945); namely, that I had isolated two
strains of S.griseus, not one, which produced streptomycin.
Even before I began my doctoral research, Waksman knew that the
strain of S.griseus which he had isolated in 1916 and kept
in his culture collection did not produce any antibiotic.
I Worked In The Basement Laboratory
Waksman was therefore not directly involved in any way with
the early stages of my streptomycin research, which I did
independently of him in a basement laboratory. For one thing, he
was away at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and elsewhere for much of
that time. Secondly, I did not need him or anyone else to tell me
what research to do, how to do it and how to interpret the results.
The techniques and equipment I used were simple and familiar to
students who had taken undergraduate courses in Soil Microbiology
and Chemistry. Also, I had done isolation and testing in an army
hospital before I began my streptomycin research in Waksman's
laboratory. I translated the relevant French and German literature
as well as the works, in Russian, of Krassilnikov, Koreniako,
Nakhimovskaia, Kriss and others (Lipman, 1921). Their research on
microbial antagonisms and antibiotic action by actinomycetes during
the 1930s antedated Waksman's debut in that field. Waksman does not
comment on microbial antagonism in his book Principles of Soil
Microbiology published in 1932 (Waksman, 1932). Nor does his
book refer to the work of Papacostas and Gate who in 1928 used the
term antibiotic and reported clinical applications of antibiotic
substances (Papacostas and Gate, 1928). In 1943, I lent Waksman my
copy of Papacostas and Gate's book which he never returned.
I could translate the above-mentioned Russian publications
because I learned Russian as a young boy on my grandparents' farm
in Connecticut. Later, in the summer between my third and fourth
undergraduate years at Rutgers University, I learned more Russian
in a course I took at Columbia University. I was at that time
interested in Pedology the science of the origin, formation and
distribution of soils; and planned to get a Ph.D. in that field. I
therefore wanted to be able to translate the original Russian works
of Dokuchaev, Glinka and others who established the science of
Pedology. In my research in Pedology, I introduced the concept of
chelation as a major mechanism in the formation and fertility of
soils (Tompkins and Bird, 1989).
I therefore did not need a tutor for my streptomycin research.
There was simply no need for Waksman to do anything after he
arranged for me to receive a monthly stipend of $40.00. I
subsequently learned that that was the lowest stipend of all
graduate students in his department at the time. I was 23 years
old, skinny, and weighed only 120 pounds. But I had an overwhelming
compulsion to find something that would control infections caused
by gram-negative bacteria and the tubercle bacillus.
It is hard to imagine what life was like in the pre-antibiotic
era. During my early years in school, some of my classmates,
friends and relatives died of infectious diseases. When I worked in
army hospitals in World War II, I saw first-hand the tragedy of
uncontrollable gram-negative bacteria. They were killing wounded
servicemen, some of whom had been flown back to the U.S. from the
North African campaign. I isolated and identified the deadly
bacteria. That was the easy part. I often spent many hours at night
with servicemen as they were dying. That was the hard part.
Why did I also take on the seemingly impossible challenge of
finding an antibiotic that would be effective in treating
tuberculosis? Again, as a young boy in a working class family, I
knew people who died of tuberculosis. Tuberculosis has killed more
people than any other infectious disease. It is responsible for the
death of a thousand million human beings.
To keep body and soul together when I was a graduate student,
I lived rent-free in a small room in one of the Plant Physiology
greenhouses. In return, I prepared mineral solutions for research
on the hydroponic growth of plants, watered and fertilized other
plants growing in soil, swept the floor of the workroom area,
maintained the proper temperature during winter months, and did
other chores. Because my income was only $40.00 a month, I ate
fruit, vegetables, and dairy products which I obtained free from
the respective departments at the Agricultural Experiment
Station.
Waksman had three laboratories. His office and two
laboratories were on the third floor of what we called the
"Administration Building". The third laboratory was in the basement
of the same building. Waksman assigned me to work in the basement
laboratory because he wanted to be as far away from the tubercle
bacillus as he could. That is also why he never visited me in the
basement laboratory during the entire time I did my streptomycin
research. He stayed away from me and what I was doing for several
reasons.
1. Waksman told me he was deathly afraid of tuberculosis, and
with good reason. Tuberculosis, also known as The Great White
Plague, is responsible for the deaths of an estimated one billion
people.
2. There was at that time no effective treatment for
tuberculosis.
3. I insisted on working with the H-37 strain of the tubercle
bacillus which I obtained from William Feldman at the Mayo Clinic,
because it was the most highly virulent strain then available.
Feldman advised me to be very careful with it because what I was
doing was very dangerous. Waksman insisted that I never bring any
TB culture up to the third floor where he was located. Feldman
himself subsequently developed tuberculosis which his doctor
believed was caused by the same strain of the tubercle bacillus he
had sent me and with which he and I had been working. This is why
Frank Ryan wrote that "The fears of Albert Schatz' colleagues,
who had refused to work with such a dangerous bacterium, were now
amply justified" (Ryan, 1992). Fortunately, s's life was
saved by "combination chemotherapy with PAS (para-aminosalicylic
acid) and streptomycin ... How fitting that it arrived just in time
to help save the life of the wonderfully unassuming William
Feldman" (Ryan, 1992).
4. The basement laboratory in which I worked was set up for
soil microbiology. It therefore had none of the safety features of
a modern TB laboratory, such as a special inoculation chamber with
ultraviolet light, and positive air pressure to circulate the
laboratory air through a filter. I did not even have a special
incubator for my TB cultures. In retrospect, I feel good because no
one who used that laboratory and no one who worked elsewhere in
that building developed tuberculosis. But I developed a positive
tuberculin reaction.
Waksman became interested in and involved himself in my
research only after I had isolated the two strains of S.griseus,
demonstrated that they both produced the same antibiotic,
established that streptomycin (which I named) was a new antibiotic,
identified S.griseus, and found that streptomycin inhibited
the growth of the tubercle bacillus in vitro. Waksman then
had others in his two third-floor laboratories verify the results I
had obtained up to that time, except for the work I did with the
tubercle bacillus. He was afraid to have others work with that
organism in his third-floor laboratories, one of which was next to
his office.
I also produced in that basement laboratory the streptomycin
which Doris Jones et al. used in the first in vivo
tests at Rutgers (Jones et al., 1944), and which Feldman
used for the first toxicity tests and the first animal experiment
with the tubercle bacillus at the Mayo Clinic. For large-scale
production, I used endless numbers of one liter Erlenmeyer flasks
containing 250 milliliters of broth. I also ran two or three stills
24 hours a day until I had enough streptomycin to satisfy Feldman's
needs. During that time, I slept on a wooden bench in the
laboratory. I drew a horizontal line with a red glass-marking
pencil on the fl asks from which I was distilling. If I was asleep
when the liquid boiled down to the red mark, the night watchman
woke me up and I added more liquid. This was during World War II
when rationing was in effect. I therefore recycled organic solvents
that I used in sufficiently large volumes to justify recycling. I
worked day and night to produce that streptomycin because I wanted
Feldman to do toxicity and in vivo tests as soon as possible, and
because Waksman did not assign anyone to help me. But the night
watchman helped. I believe that S.griseus is the first
actinomycete used for large-scale industrial production. The stills
in the basement laboratory recalled a small still I ran, during
Prohibition, to convert grain to alcohol when I was a young boy on
a farm in Connecticut.
In 1963, William Feldman and his wife, Ruth, visited my wife
Vivian and me in Santiago, Chile, when they were on a group tour of
South America. I was at that time a professor at the University of
Chile. When we talked about the early days of streptomycin, Feldman
was surprised to learn that I had prepared the first streptomycin
he used at the Mayo Clinic. He said Waksman never told him that.
I earned my Ph.D. degree in two-and-a-half years without
having a master's degree. Those two-and-a-half years do not include
the five months I worked on the production of fumaric acid,
actinomycin, clavacin and streptothricin, which had nothing to do
with my dissertation research on streptomycin. I drove myself
because I knew how serious tuberculosis and gram-negative
infections were, and how important it would be to find antibiotics
to control those diseases. What I was working for was, therefore,
much more meaningful to me than simply meeting the minimum
requirements for a Ph.D. degree.
However, I did have time to meet and go walking with a young
woman, Vivian Rosenfeld, who was an undergraduate student in the
Rutgers University College of Agriculture. Because of my production
schedule in preparing streptomycin for the Mayo Clinic and because
neither of us had much money we each earned $10.00 a week - we
frequently dated in the basement laboratory. When Vivian knocked on
one of the laboratory windows, I went to the front door to let her
in. Vivian may have subsequently saved my life. In 1947, when
Waksman recommended me as the soil microbiologist for the nuclear
bomb test in the Bikini Atoll, Vivian insisted that I not go. (This
was one of the only two jobs Waksman ever recommended me for). The
navy wanted a soil microbiologist to study the microflora before
and immediately after the nuclear blast. Many servicemen and others
who participated in this and other nuclear bomb tests died of
radiation-induced illnesses.
Albert Schatz producing streptomycin in 1943 in the basement
laboratory at Rutgers University. This batch of streptomycin was
used by William Feldman in the first guinea pig test with
Mycobacterium tuberculosis at the Mayo Clinic.
The Streptomycin Lawsuit
This is the true factual account of how I discovered
streptomycin. I have already enumerated what I did, independently
of Waksman, before he became interested in and actively involved in
my work. In addition, I subsequently wrote and am the senior author
of the publications which report the discovery of streptomycin
(Schatz et al., 1944), its bacteriostatic and bactericidal
activity on the tubercle bacillus (Schatz and Waksman, 1944), and
strain variation of S.griseus (Schatz and Waksman, 1945). It
is unprecedented for a graduate student to be the senior author of
three publications which report a discovery of major importance.
But Waksman knew that everybody in his department was well aware of
what I had done, and how hard I had worked to do it. That's why he
permitted me to be the senior author on those three papers.
Waksman, who was chairman of my graduate committee, and the other
two members (Robert Starkey, Professor of Soil Microbiology, and
Walter Russell, Professor of Biochemistry and Dean of the Graduate
School at Rutgers University) all accepted my doctoral dissertation
as fulfilling the university requirement of original and creative
research for the Ph.D. degree. Finally, my name is on several
streptomycin patents in the United States and other countries.
"In the United States it is required that a patent application
be filed in the name of the inventor or inventors ... A patent in
the United States is an important document helping to establish the
creativity of an individual just as a technical publication is ...
Technically in the United States a patent which does not bear the
name of an inventor or which bears the name of a person other than
the inventor(s) is an invalid patent" (Luedemann, 1991).
On May 3, 1946, Waksman and I, at his insistence, both signed
the streptomycin patent assignment which stated that each of us
would receive $1.00. He did not tell me that he had a previous
agreement with the Rutgers Research and Endowment Foundation.
According to that agreement, which was contingent on my signing the
patent assignment, he would receive 20% of the streptomycin
royalties. When I learned, in 1949, that Waksman was secretly
receiving royalties, contrary to his personal assurance to me that
neither of us would do so, I started a lawsuit. Pretrial
depositions taken for that lawsuit revealed that Waksman had, by
that time, secretly received $350,000 in royalties, although he had
publicly denied receiving any royalties. The Rutgers Research and
Endowment Foundation had received $2,600,000 in royalties. I had
received no royalties. The lawsuit also revealed that Waksman,
during the entire time I was doing research, had a secret agreement
with a pharmaceutical company which paid him $300 a month for
consulting, and for giving that company exclusive information about
the research going on in his laboratories, along with patent
rights. When that lawsuit was settled on December 29, 1950, I
received a small percentage of the royalties. In that settlement,
defendant Waksman acknowledged that "As alleged in the
complaint and agreed in the answer, the plaintiff' Albert
Schatz "is entitled to credit legally and scientifically as co-
discoverer, with Dr.Selman A.Waksman, of streptomycin"
(Anonymous, 1950). If Waksman had denied I was a
c-discoverer of streptomycin, he would have invalidated all
streptomycin patents and stopped payment of all royalties.
Robert C. Clothier, President of Rutgers University and
President of the Rutgers Research and Endowment Foundation, issued
a press release on December 29, 1950, the day the lawsuit was
settled. In it, he said, "It has never been disputed that
Dr.Schatz was a c-discoverer of streptomycin. That has been a
matter of public record since 1945, when Dr.Waksman and Dr.Schatz
jointly applied for the streptomycin patent". But Clothier
neglected to mention me in his 1949-1950 annual report to the
Governor of New Jersey. That report is required by the New Jersey
State Legislature and the U.S. Congress, which appropriates funds
to Rutgers University. In that report, dated September 1,1950,
Clothier informed the governor about "the discovery of the
antibiotic, streptomycin, by Dr.Waksman".
Waksman disregarded what he had agreed to in the lawsuit, when
he accepted the Nobel Prize awarded specifically for the discovery
of streptomycin. He also disregarded the oath which he and I had
jointly signed as part of the patent application. In that oath,
Waksman swore that he verily" believed that he and I were
"the original, first and joint inventors" of streptomycin
(Anonymous, 1948). Waksman also disregarded his February 9, 1945,
affidavit, which he submitted to the patent office, in which he
referred to "streptomycin, the new antibiotic that Schatz and I
have discovered" (Anonymous, 1948). He also disregarded the
February 9,1945 affidavit of Elizabeth Bugie, a fellow graduate
student who confirmed some of my original findings. In her
affidavit, also submitted to the patent office, Bugie wrote, "As
an assistant to Dr.Waksman, I first learned from him about
streptomycin, which he and Dr.Schatz had discovered"
(Anonymous, 1948). However, by 1949, when I asked Waksman what
was being done with the royalties, he had already received fame and
a substantial amount of those royalties. "By that time he had
convinced himself that Schatz's contribution to the discovery of
streptomycin was 'only a small one'" (Wainwright, 1988).
"All's Well That Ends Well"
Although this is the 50th anniversary of the discovery of
streptomycin, it is only within the past few years that the true
story of that discovery has become widely known.
One way to evaluate the importance of my contribution is to
separate the actual discovery of streptomycin from the
developmental work that was subsequently done to produce it for
wide-spread use. In this respect, Luedemann wrote: "The
important thing is to get the culture to start with ... If you
don't have anything to work with ... you're not going to get very
far ... Without the organism, you don't have the antibiotic (Carlos
C. Carpenter) ... Discoveries are made by individuals, and it
rarely can be any other way ... After all, how many collaborators
can dance on the point of a discovery?" (Luedemann, 1991).
My contribution can also be evaluated in another way. "As of
the end of 1978, we estimate the amounts of royalties received by
Rutgers at 12 million dollars for streptomycin ... In 1954, the
Institute of Microbiology of Rutgers University opened its doors.
This institute had been made possible by a grant of 3.5 million
dollars by the Rutgers Research and Endowment Foundation to Rutgers
University" (Lechevalier, 1980). By 1954, all or almost all of the
royalties came from streptomycin patents. I received considerably
less royalties than Waksman did. (Originally I received none). It
therefore follows that I contributed more of the $3,500,000
streptomycin royalties for the Institute than Waksman did.
This is the story of what I did and how and why I did it. What
Waksman did was have others confirm my original results (except my
in vitro work with the tubercle bacillus), and continue the
research I initiated on the production and purification of
streptomycin. He also began to trivialize me and what I had done.
Waksman explained why he did that in a conversation with Doris
Jones. In a pretrial deposition, Doris recalled Waksman's comment.
"Dr.Waksman told me confidentially that the reason why he didn't
let Al have more credit for the discovery of streptomycin was that
he was so aggressive, and if he were allowed this credit, it would
go to his head and, therefore, Dr.Waksman was protecting Al, since
he was older and could assume credit for this discovery. That was
why he hadn't pushed Al's name" (Anonymous, 1950).
When I discovered streptomycin in 1943, I was a 23-year-old,
idealistic graduate student. Waksman, my department head, was a
business-oriented consultant to a pharmaceutical company. But I did
not know that until my lawsuit in 1950. When Waksman realized that
streptomycin was a major discovery with considerable financial
potentiality, he set himself up (on the third floor of the
Administration Building) as the fountainhead of information about
streptomycin. He kept me in the basement laboratory and, after a
while, no longer introduced me to or even told me about reporters
and others who interviewed him. I learned about what was going on
when I read magazine articles, newspaper accounts and other
reports. These were written by people who got all their information
from Waksman. They did not know, because Waksman never told them,
that I was in the basement laboratory of the same building where
and when they were interviewing him. Waksman also participated in
the large-scale development of streptomycin for use world-wide;
negotiated patent arrangements with pharmaceutical companies, from
which he profited handsomely; and eventually took full credit for
the discovery of streptomycin. Others, however, have recognized and
acknowledged my role in the discovery of streptomycin. After
penicillin was discovered in 1929, it laid dormant for several
years. But streptomycin, which was discovered in 1943, was destined
to receive immediate attention. That would have occurred even
without Waksman's involvement in its industrial development. World
War II, which needed penicillin, also needed streptomycin.
Waksman created the myth that he, and he alone, had discovered
streptomycin, just as he created the myth of his sick chicken.
Until I read the articles in the Smithsonian and in the
Rutgers Magazine, I assumed that Wainwright had laid the
myth of that poor, sick chicken to rest (Wainwright, 1991), as he
had done with the myth that Waksman wove around himself
(Wainwright, 1988, 1989, 1990, 1991). Wainwright concluded that
"Streptomycin was in fact discovered by one of Waksman's
research students, Albert Schatz" (Wainwright, 1989). And,
"There can be no doubt that streptomycin was actually discovered
by Albert Schatz" (Wainwright, 1988). "Anyone who reads
Schatz's thesis ... cannot doubt that it was he who made
streptomycin a reality" (Wainwright, 1988). In his book,
Miracle Cure: The Story of Antibiotics, Wainwright wrote,
"The history of streptomycin ... in Chapter 8 ... is the first
detailed account of this story to be published, and in it I have
once again attempted to redress an historical imbalance, this time
in favour of Albert Schatz, one of its c-discoverers. In so doing,
I hope I have not been unfair to the memory of Selman Waksman, the
c-discoverer who recede all the credit for streptomycin"
(Wainwright, 1990). Frank Ryan also discussed my role in the
discovery of streptomycin in his recent book Tuberculosis: The
Greatest Story Never Told. Among other things, he wrote, "So,
calmly and methodically, Albert Schatz, barely twenty-three
years old, now performed an experiment that would ultimately prove
one of the most important in the history of medicine. He tested
streptomycin against tuberculosis" (Ryan, 1992). Both Milton
Wainwright and Frank Ryan visited me in Philadelphia, independently
of one another, to interview me at length, for four days, for the
books they were writing.
Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird pointed out that
"Albert Schatz, Ph.D., discovered the wonder drug streptomycin",
in their book Secrets of the Soil (Tompkins and Bird,
1989). In 1991, George Luedemann commented on "the discovery of
streptomycin by Albert Schatz" and then went on to say:
"This antibiotic was useful against tuberculosis and was
significantly less toxic than the antibiotics that had previously
been found ... Thus the golden age of antibiotics was born -
an age of miracles and magic bullets - substances produced without
seeming reason by esoteric microbes which had previously been
studied mostly because of the diseases they caused in plants,
animals and men. It seemed as if yesterday's villainous microbes
had suddenly become today's heroes".
Epilogue
On April 15,1993, the Theobald Smith Society, which is the New
Jersey Branch of the American Society for Microbiology,
acknowledged my role in the discovery of streptomycin. I received
the Selman A.Waksman Honorary Lectureship Award Medal. The title of
my lecture was Looking Back on Fifty Years of Research. This
lecture was historically connected with a paper I presented at a
meeting of the Theobald Smith Society fifty years ago. As a
graduate student, I had been invited to speak on streptomycin as a
new antibiotic and its potential in treating tuberculosis. That was
the first report about streptomycin presented to a scientific
society. It was also the first time I spoke at a scientific
meeting. So great was the curtain of silence that Waksman wove
around my role in the discovery of streptomycin that only recently
have I been again invited to tell my story in the United States.
This is the second article I have written in the 50 years that
have elapsed since the discovery of streptomycin in 1943. I am
grateful to the editor of Actinomycetes for publishing this
account of my role in that discovery.
I have been asked on several occasions why my first article,
Some Personal Reflections on the Discovery of Streptomycin,
was published in the Pakistan Dental Review, in 1965
(Scatz, 1965). That article was an address I delivered on November
5, 1964, at a ceremony in the Thorax Hospital, Santiago, Chile,
when I was honored for the discovery of streptomycin. I had
previously, over a period of several years, submitted that article
to editors of many U.S. journals, who either rejected it or never
acknowledged receiving it. By 1965, I had done considerable
research on dental caries, and was an associate editor of the
Pakistan Dental Review. That is why my first article was
published in that journal.
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Copyright 1993 C.E.T.A.
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