Selman Waksman Born - July 22, 1888

Selman Waksman, who is credited with developing streptomycin, was born on this day in 1888.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to this day in history class. It's July twenty two.
Selman Waksman was born on this day in eight and
he's credited with the discovery of the antibiotics streptomycin, but
there is some debate about whether that credit is completely deserved.
Someone Waksman was born to a family of devout Jews
near Kiev and what's now Ukraine, and his family moved

(00:27):
to the United States to escape persecution. He became a
United States citizen in nineteen sixteen after getting a pH
d from the University of California at Berkeley, he returned
to Rutgers University, where he had gotten some of his
earlier degrees, where he became a professor of microbiology. He
also became the head of the microbiology department when it

(00:48):
was founded in nineteen forty, and a lot of his
work had to do with soil bacteriology. He started building
on the work of a French biologist named Renee du Bois,
who had found a bacterium in soil that attacked other bacteria.
It's specifically attacked the bacterium that caused pneumonia. So this

(01:08):
thing that he had found in the soil had the
potential to treat pneumonia, so Waxman and other colleagues started
trying to look for other bacteria that could maybe attack
other pathogens. A huge part of this work was done
by one of his graduate students, a man named H.
Boyd Woodruff, and there were about fifty other graduate students

(01:29):
who were also part of this project over the years.
This is pretty common way of doing scientific research, with
graduate students carrying out a lot of the labor. They
were painstaking lye isolating microbes in the soil samples and
then painstakingly testing them against a bunch of other specific pathogens.
With a lot of very detailed work, Woodruff found a

(01:52):
bacterium that could kill and inhibit the growth of bacteria,
and it was called Actinomyces antibioticus. But unfortunately, this bacterium
was also harmful to pretty much everything else. It was
not something you could actually give to a person to
treat a disease because the bacterium itself would make them sicker.

(02:13):
They kept looking, though, and two years later they isolated
another bacterium that was less toxic, but still toxic. Still
not quite where they wanted to be. Eventually, though, they
found twenty or so different bacteria that could all fight infections,
and they coined the name antibiotics to describe all of these.
In nineteen forty four, Waksman and his team finally isolated

(02:38):
streptomycin from strepped to mice's grissus, which was also isolated
by a graduate student. This one was named Albert Shots.
This was finally made into an actual drug through an
agreement with Mark Pharmaceuticals, and this drug was colossally important.
Tuberculosis is a devastating disease. At the time, it had

(03:00):
no cure, it had no effective treatment. They were doing
things like bundling people up with blankets and having them
sleep out in the cold to treat tuberculosis. It was
not actually an effective way to treat tuberculosis at all.
The need for this drug was so great that Waxman
actually renegotiated his whole deal with Mark Pharmaceuticals to allow
other manufacturers to get access to the patent and to

(03:23):
also make the drug. That was how much they needed
to have an effective treatment for tuberculosis for the first time.
But then in Albert Shots sued Stone Waksman. He argued
that this had been his discovery and not Waxman and
that Waxman had taken the credit from him on purpose.
This fight got really really ugly, with Waxman's legal team

(03:46):
making false accusations against Albert Shots, and the case was
finally settled in nineteen fifty. This settlement led to the
royalties being divided up differently. That's the royalties that people
were paying to use that patent. Eight percent of the
royalties to Wretgers University, ten percent to Salmon Waksman, three
percent to Albert Shots, and then the remainder was divided

(04:06):
among the other people who had been part of this project.
Salmon Waksman was awarded a Nobel Prize for all this
in nineteen fifty two, and although Albert Shots was named
in the speech, he was not named in the award.
It is still not completely clear exactly what happened here.
It is extremely typical for graduate students to carry out

(04:26):
a lot of work on their professors projects. There's a
whole debate that's a legitimate debate to be had about
that system and whether it is just Opinions are divided
though about whether this specific case is just how it
went in science programs and in graduate schools, or whether
Waksman really did do something wrong. You can learn more

(04:49):
about this and all of the debate in the July
thirteen episode of Stuffy Miss in History Class, and you
can subscribe to the stay in History Class on Apple podcasts,
Google podcasts, and whoever else you get your podcasts. Next time,
we will take a look at a Cold War era revolution.

(05:13):
H