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July 17, 2013 26 mins

An accomplished bacteriologist, Selman Waksman and his students and colleagues isolated many new antibiotics in the 1940s, including streptomycin and neomycin, earning him the nickname Father of Antibiotics.

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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I am Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. Holly,
have you ever been on Stepo Mason? I don't know.
I don't really either. I mean, I've certainly taken my

(00:23):
fair share of antibiotics, but yeah, Strepto mycin was a
pretty groundbreaking one. Um. It still has lots of uses,
and the person who usually gets the credit for its
invention is a guy named Selman Waksman. He's a bacteriologist
who published more than four hundred scientific papers. He wrote

(00:45):
or co wrote eighteen books, and he and his students
and colleagues isolated lots of new antibiotics in the nineteen forties.
These included Strepto micn and neo mycon. Those are the
two most well known of the ones that actually got
some practical use. Some of the others did not have
practical uses. Uh, and all of this earned him the
nickname Father of Antibiotics. He won the Nobel Prize in

(01:09):
Physiology or Medicine in nineteen fifty two, along with more
than sixty other awards, and twenty two honorary degrees, but
there is some dispute about whether he actually deserves the
credit for having discovered strap to Maycin. So today we're
going to talk about his life and his background in

(01:30):
the whole strap to Mycen controversy. Cool We should probably
start at the beginning, though, right let's do so. Selman
Abraham Walksman was born on July eight, eight eight, near
Kiev in what is now Ukraine. His parents were Jacob
Waksman and Fredia London Walksman. His father rented out houses
that he owned, and his mother ran a dry goods business.

(01:53):
He also had a little sister, who died of diphtheria
when she was very young. The whole family were out Jews.
Walksman had a philanthropic disposition, and he and some friends
organized a school for poor boys, as well as caring
for the sick. His education started at a Jewish religious school,
and his mother was worried that focusing only on religious

(02:16):
study with limit his potential in the future, so she
also hired private tutors to educate him in other areas.
In nineteen ten, he got a diploma from the Fifth
Gymnasium in Odessa as a Jew he didn't have a
lot of opportunities for higher education within the Russian Empire.
His mother had also passed away not long before his graduation,

(02:38):
and many of his family had already moved to the
United States to escape persecution, so he decided to emigrate
as well. Uh and he stayed with a cousin who
had a farm in New Jersey. He started college at
Rutger's on a scholarship in the fall of nineteen eleven,
and he got a Bachelor of Science and Agriculture there
in nineteen fifteen. He went on to work on a

(02:59):
master's at Rutgers, and while there he worked as a
research assistant in soil bacteriology at the New Jersey Agriculture
Experiment Station. In nineteen sixteen, he received his masters and
became a U. S citizen officially. That year. He also
married Deborah b. Mitnick, who was an artist and vocalist
who was from the same part of Russia where he
had grown up. They later had a son named Byron,

(03:22):
who went on to become an immunologist and to teach
at Harvard and Yale. Walksman went on to get additional education.
He received his pH d in biochemistry from the University
of California at Berkeley in nineteen eighteen. After Waksman graduated,
Dr J. G. Lippmann, who he had worked for as
a research assistant while working on his masters, invited him

(03:44):
to come back to Rutgers. He started as a lecturer
and worked his way up in the university, focusing most
of his research on soil microbes. He became professor of
microbiology and head of the microbiology department when it was
founded in nineteen forty. When Rutgers established an Institute of
Microbiology in nineteen forty nine, he became its director, and

(04:06):
when he retired in ninety eight, he actually kept a
lab and office at the institute and continued to do
some work there, although he really spent much more of
his time writing and giving lectures. In addition to all
his work on soil bacteriology, he also worked in marine bacteriology.
He helped organize the Woods Whole Oceanographic Institutions Division of
Marine Bacteriology in the thirties. His work there continued until

(04:30):
the early forties, and from there he became a trustee.
And of course what he is most famous for, he
developed a bunch of antibiotics. Dr Waxman's master's and PhD
work had focused on bacteria known as actin of mice eats.
These are anaerobic microbes that live in the soil. They
use branching filaments to create these colonies or mysilia, so

(04:53):
they resemble bacteria in their size and their physiology, but
this filament structure is more like what you'd think with
a fungus. While most of the acton of my seats
are harmless, some of them can carry disease and others
can produce antibiotics. In seven Renee Dubois, a French biologists,
joined Dr Walksman's lab and he was studying the interactions

(05:16):
between organisms in the soil and the way cellulose broke
down in this process. He actually pinpointed a bacterium that
attacks strepped a caucus pneumonia, which as the name suggests,
causes pneumonia, and this inspired Dr Walksman and his colleagues
to look for other soil microorganisms that could fight against pathogens.
And this is a pretty logical leak. Lots of bacteria

(05:39):
in the soil are competing for a limited amount of
real estate and food, so logically they need to be
able to compete with each other and defend themselves and
attack each other. So, working with a grand student named H.
Boyd Woodroffe, Dr Walksman started systematically looking for antimicrobial activity
in soils. And what they would do is isolate these

(06:01):
colonies of specific microbes from the soil and then they
would culture those colonies in a petrie dish and then
exposed them to other microbes to see if inhibition zones
formed around the colonies, which in my head is like
a bacterial version of robot battles. Kind of. They just
kind of were like, let's grow this one and this one,
put them together and fight fight fight. Yeah, yeah, that's
that's sort of like what it was, except that robot

(06:24):
battles are exciting. This is kind of a slow burn.
Is tedious, painstaking work. They had to isolate thousands of
different microbes, grow colonies of them, and then test them
against specific disease causing bacteria and a petri dish. This
was It was a very labor intensive, delicate work that

(06:46):
had to be done very precisely so they didn't contaminate things.
And over the years, more than fifty graduate students and
visiting scholars took part in this project, they were really
taking a shotgun approach to getting lots of bacteria it
from the soil and seeing what they did. So they
needed lots of people to carry out these instructions and

(07:06):
do the actual things. So once they had isolated a
particular bacterium and found it to have some kind of
beneficial activity, they then had to work out how to
further isolate just the antimicrobial compound it produced. This could
involve everything from solvents too very precise temperature controls. The
first such bacterium that Woodruff isolated was named Actinomyces antibioticus.

(07:31):
This was a species of Actinomyces that produced a substance
that could both kill and inhibit the growth of bacteria,
so it was both bacteria static and bacterious sidal. He
called this substance actinomycin, and he discovered that you could
use petroleum to separate it into two distinct substances. One
killed bacteria and halted its growth and the others simply

(07:54):
killed it. So it was pretty cool. I was able
to kill some bad bacteria, but unfortunately actinomycin was super
toxic to other living things, not just bacteria, so it
didn't really have any sort of pharmacological benefit at that point,
but Dr Waxman didn't give up there. He went on
systematically testing various actin of ice seats, looking for ones

(08:18):
that produced antibiotic substances that weren't so toxic to the
plants or animals that needed to fight off infection. And
a lot of this work happened through lots of assistance
and graduate students in lab text and those types of
people doing the actual work based on this idea. Yeah,
because as you said, it was a shotgun approach. They
were looking at lots of different things. Everything needed attention

(08:39):
and things to be done to it. One person could
not have handled all of that lab work. Uh So,
two years later, Woodroffe isolated UH strepto thricin, which looked
more promising than actinamycin, but it turned out it was
still toxic. The toxic city just took a little while
to kick in, so it wasn't immediately a parent that

(09:00):
it was toxic. Delayed response. Eventually, Dr Watsman, his grad students,
and his colleagues found more than twenty bacteria produced substances
that could fight infections. He also suggested the term antibiotics,
which had first been used as early as eight one
as a name for this growing class of antimicrobial agents,

(09:21):
and of course, in the midst of all of this,
a controversy kind of grew out. Uh In nineteen forty
four came the discovery that had the most impact on
human health, and that was stripped a mycin. Streptomycin was
active against tuberculosis, and it was the first antibiotic to
successfully treat the disease, so that was huge. Tuberculosis had

(09:41):
existed for basically all of human history. Uh In one
a vaccine had been developed in France using a bovine
strain of tuberculosis that wasn't as virulent, but before strapped
to mycin, there was really no effective treatment for people
who got it. In the nineteenth century, tuberculosis was responsible
as many as a quarter of the deaths in Europe,

(10:03):
and it often struck people who were otherwise pretty young
and healthy. All three Bronte Sisters, John Keats, Frederick Chopin,
Friends Kafka, and many other notable people died of tuberculosis.
When you read about somebody dying of consumption, tuberculosis is
what they're talking about. And as a side note, My
grandmother actually had tuberculosis and spent part of her childhood

(10:26):
in a tuberculosis sanatorium recovering. I don't want to say
that's cool, because it's not. But it's neat historical reference
point to hand. Yeah, it's a personal historical reference point
I have to this particular story. So that made the
discovery of streptomycin extremely important. It was also very important
because World War Two was underway and the military desperately

(10:47):
needed more tools to fight infection. But Dr Waksman wasn't
actually the person who isolated strepped a mice's grissiest, which
was the bacterium that produced strepped a micn That distinction
goes to another of Dr Waksman's grad students, Albert Schotz,
who was listed as co author on the first paper
about as grissias. Here's how strepped demyces grisseas went from

(11:10):
a bacterium to a drug. In N nine, Murk and
Company had contacted Dr Waksman with a proposal. Dr Waksman
and his researchers would carry on methodically identifying antimicrobial activity
and soil, and then Mark would pick up the follow
up and research and development that would be needed to
turn these discoveries into actual marketable drugs. Mark would do

(11:35):
all the efficacy and safety tests uh the kind of
stuff that that Dr Waksman and his team couldn't really do,
and Mirk would give. As part of this arrangement, Dr
Waksman and his team acknowledgment and any patents that it
obtained for the drugs. In return, Rutgers would get a
percentage of the royalties from the sale of the drug.

(11:55):
And this was meant to be an exclusive agreement between
Murky and Rutgers slash Dr Waksman. And thanks to this agreement,
when Albert Schottz isolated strepto mices Grissiest, Mark was able
to supply the Mayo Clinic with enough strepped a MYCN
for the necessary trials. By with the help of Mayo

(12:17):
Clinic doctors William Feldman and H. Corwin Henshaw, Streptomycin had
made its way through animal trials and into clinical trials.
In the process, it was proved to be effective against
typhoid fever, ubonic plague, cholera, and others. In addition to TV,
it was a broad spectrum antibiotic effective on both gram

(12:38):
positive and gram negative bacteria and Matt made it pretty
much a groundbreaking wonder drug. Yeah. It was such a
success that Dr Waksman was no longer comfortable with his
original exclusive agreement with Mark. The need for the drug
was too great, so he renegotiated their deal to have
the patent assigned to Rutgers and licensed to Mark and

(12:58):
other manufacturers, and for that Rutgers would receive a royalty.
So he basically just wanted it to be produced in
great volume, as quickly as possible, for as many people
as possible. This patent was granted in under the new
deal with Mark, of the royalties on the drugs manufacturer
would go to Rutgers and would go to Dr Watsman.

(13:21):
The university used this money to fund its Institute of
Microbiology and set up an endowment for the institute. Dr
Waksman shared some of the money that came to him
personally with the assistance and students who had worked on
the patent with him. He also established a Foundation for
Microbiology to support microbiological research with half of the of

(13:42):
the royalties that came to him, and he also set
up a scholarship for immigrant students at Ruggers. His wife
also established a music scholarship at Rutgers. So from that
one discovery, a lot of benefit happened to a lot
of people. Right apart from the medical benefit, there was
a lot of educational benefit for a lot of people.
In ninety nine, Albert Shots, who's the person who had

(14:03):
identified the two strains of bacteria that made steptomycin, sued
Dr Waksman. His argument was that streptomyson existed only because
of his initial discovery, and that Dr Waksman had stopped
acknowledging his contribution, keeping all of the credit for himself.
Dr Waksman's counter argument was that Shots was working as

(14:24):
an assistant on his project using his methodology, which had
previously identified many other bacteria that produced anti microbial compounds. So,
in Waksman's view, Shots was basically a technician carrying out
his project based on his idea. According to Peter Pringle,
who was the author of the book Experiment eleven Dark

(14:46):
Secrets Behind the Discovery of a Wonder Drug, which chronicles
the discovery and subsequent lawsuit, Dr Waksman's defense team made
all kinds of specious accusations against Shots, including false accusations
that his uncle had stolen his no books in the
lab and removed crucial papers before returning them. Pringle's account
characterizes Dr Waksman as a self aggrandizing bully who made

(15:09):
his lab assistance to grunt work with no credit, while
he got all the glory and built everybody who contributed
to the project out of the money that they were
entitled to from the royalties. He also characterizes the allegation
of the stolen notebooks as faults. The papers were actually
somewhere else entirely due to the patent filings that were
going on at the time, and the missing page, which

(15:30):
there was really a missing page, was much later in
the experiment than the point where Shots had isolated the
bacterium that gets the credit for making step Tomison. But
Rolin D. Hotch Kiss, writing for the National Academy of Sciences,
characterizes Dr Waksman as a philanthropic man whose pride was
tempered with modesty, and whose colleagues viewed him with admiration

(15:53):
and really warm respect. The case between Shots and Waksman
went on for a year and was settled in night
teen fifty in the settlement of the of the royalties
that were not going to Rutgers, Walksman would get ten percent,
Shots would get three percent, and the other people who
had participated in the project would split up the remaining
seven percent. The Nobel prize in nineteen fifty two went

(16:17):
to Dr Walksman only, although the award speech also referenced Shots,
the Mayo Clinic doctors who conducted the trials on the drug,
and others who had participated in the research. Some of
the Shots supporters petitioned the Nobel Committee to give the
prize to Shots as well, but in the end the
prize went only to Dr Walksman. This was really a

(16:37):
common practice at the time. The Nobel Committee generally would
recognize the senior scientist on a project um and not
more junior scientists are assistants who had helped with it.
But Scientific American has this event listed as one of
history's ten biggest Nobel snubs. A two thousand two articles
in Nature described the Shots Walksman incident as an example

(17:00):
of the misattribution of scientific discovery as being widespread in
the world of science. In response to this Nature article,
writing in the Journal of the History of Medicine and
Allied Sciences, William Kingston described Shots as discovery as a
matter of luck. Because of the systematic way that Dr
Waksman was having his assistants work, it could have been

(17:21):
any one of them to isolate the bacterium that led
to streptomycin. This actually led to some back and forth
in the Letters to the Editor in which Kingston goes
up against Milton Wainwright, author of Miracle Cure the story
of penicillin in the Golden Age of antibiotics. Back and
forth is basically, I see it this way, I see
it this way. Yeah, there's not on both sides. So

(17:43):
clearly this argument is really far from over, and both
people who were the key players in it have died.
Dr Waksman died on August sixteenth, nineteen seventy three, and
Albert Shots, who did go on to become a doctor
and have a career in science, died on January seventeen,
two thousand and five. The lab where all this happened,
which is Martin Hall on the campus at Rutgers, was

(18:05):
actually turned into a museum to the development of antibiotics
at the university. On two thousand five, the American Chemical
Society named the lab a National Historic Chemical Landmark and
installed a plaque commemorating it on the Cook campus. So
the debate rages on, but we still recognize it as
a very important place and discovery. The debate. Yeah, and

(18:27):
I have after having done the research, I cannot decide
how I really feel about the debate. Like Albert Schatz
was clearly very upset and felt like he was working
at just crazy long hours in a lab bent on
finding a cure for tuberculosis, which clearly was true. That's
sort of what being a graduate assistant is like a

(18:49):
lot of the time. Um, But it's hard to to
substantiate some of the claims that he makes about Dr Waksman,
Like he he claims that Dr Waksman was not really
about finding a cure for tubercular system, was definitely afraid
of tubercularists and didn't want to have it in a lab.
I'm not really sure how we could back that up. Yeah,
without going through well in the characterizations made of Dr

(19:10):
Waksman seemed counter to what all of his colleagues felt
about him. But then we're still going on a this
person said, this person said, this person said thing. You
can't really Yeah, it's a it's a very by that scientifically,
there's some level of he said, he said about it,
and both of the keys are deceased at this point.

(19:31):
But it's just unquestionable how important that discovery was, regardless
of who ultimately should get the most credit for it.
And it sounds like a lot of the money ended
up really going to Yeah, the bulk of the money
went directly back into education, into and neither of these people.
So it's interesting fight to be happening. Yeah, like take

(19:56):
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(20:39):
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(21:01):
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(21:45):
the microphone at the top of the homepage and type
and stuff that stamps dot com and enter stuff. Do
you also have listener mail? Uh? This listener mail is
from Doug. It's about our episode on Robin Hood. Doug said,
is I enjoyed listening to your podcast on the origins
of Robin Hood. One area you didn't cover was the
possible folkloric origins of Robin Hood and his associations with

(22:09):
the green Man. The green Man is a figure that
appears in decorations, particularly churches throughout Europe. He's usually depicted
as a face peering from the greenery, often with the
foliage of appearing from his mouth. Here's a good example.
He sends a link to it. His origins are a mystery,
but he appears to be a holdover from paganism that

(22:29):
got co opted by the Christian shirts Church in the
same way that churches are often cited on pagan sites
of worship. In England at least, he's generally associated with
churches dedicated to certain saints. Particularly Mary. He's probably worth
a podcast by himself. Robin Hood has been associated with
the green Man, variously as the green Man himself, as

(22:51):
an aspect or as an attendent spirit. They've both been
associated with the May Games and connected to Mary. Disentangling
the who, what, where and how is a hopeless task,
but it's worth consideration alongside the purely historical possibilities. This
connection has been touched on in one of the movies
robin Hood with Patrick Bergin and Name with Thurman, which

(23:11):
she might enjoy more than the Kevin Costner version. I
can attest that that is true. I like the Patrick
Bergin version much better. As a side note, the death
of Robin Hood where he fires an arrow and is
buried where the arrow lands echoes the story of the
giant Pierce Shaks a story local to my mother's area
of Hertfordshire. Robin Hood doesn't have an outrage devil after

(23:34):
him now, Doug. So thank you so much Doug for
writing this letter. Um, you are very right in the
part about separating out or you know, disentangling all this
would be a hopeless task, and that's the reason that
I didn't get into it in episode well, because he
mentions it to it. Really, there's so much myth and
laura around green Man that yeah, it can be its own.

(23:56):
I went down a green Man robin Hole Robin hole,
go into kind of green Man robin Hood rabbit hole
for a while while researching the podcast, and once I
fought my way back out of it, I was like,
I just need to not get into this. It's gonna
be a long digression that's going to be more speculation
than anything else. So that is something that a couple
of scholars, especially medievalists who uh have written about lots

(24:20):
of different parts of medieval culture that spanned religion and folklore,
have kind of pointed out that They're like, there are
churches where there's lots of green Man imagery in the church,
and that's also where some of the first Robin Hood
plays were staged. Like, so there's connections, but a lot

(24:40):
of them are pretty speculative and we don't know what
quite where they came from. So the whole podcast was
already really spa it's all dotted lines, but then and
then I was like, here's even more speculations. So that's
why we did not really dive into the green Man
part of robin Hood. But that is something that you
can find some information about if you don't mind getting
a the weeds on it for a bit, and they

(25:01):
could one day become another podcast on item. Yes, so
thank you very much for writing to us about that. Good.
If you would like to write to us about this
or any other episode or topic, you may We're at
History Podcast at Discovery dot com. We're also on Twitter
at mist in history and on Facebook at Facebook dot
com slash history class Stuff. You can find us on

(25:23):
Tumbler at mt in history dot tumbler dot com, and
we are on Pinterest too. If you would like to
learn more about what we've talked about today, you can
put the word antibiotics in our search bar. You will
find an article about how bacteria become resistant to antibiotics.
You can learn all of that and a whole lot
more at our website, which is how stuff Works dot
com for more on this and thousands of other topics

(25:49):
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(26:11):
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