Experiment Eleven

Read Experiment Eleven for Free Online

Book: Read Experiment Eleven for Free Online
Authors: Peter Pringle
test, involved testing the microbes, once found, to see which germs they were capable of destroying and then how to produce the antibiotic.)
    In Waksman’s Mayo Clinic paper, he said that “both streptothricin and streptomycin were isolated and studied by the use of these procedures.” This was not true, and as the supervisor of Schatz’s thesis, and one of his examiners, he should have known that. The thesis shows that Albert Schatz did not use the first step in isolating his microbe. And when he used the second step, he got no positive results. If he had used only Waksman’s “six steps,” the chances are that he “would not have isolated”
A. griseus
because those first two steps did not produce a clear zone . He isolated the streptomycin-producing strain through random selection, using the same kind of intuition that a gardener might use to pick a good, healthy plant for breeding. However, Waksman’s myth would create the impression among many observers of his antibiotic program that all his graduatestudents, including Schatz, followed a strict method, laid out before Schatz started his Ph.D. That Schatz found his microbes through the serendipitous method of random selection and that “ perhaps some intuition was needed” would not be acknowledged by Schatz’s peers for another half century.
    THAT EVENING AT the Mayo Clinic, Waksman left a manuscript of Schatz’s in vitro paper with Feldman, who, again prodded by Hinshaw, asked for at least a footnote on their own work to be included. “It would very properly give you the credit for recognizing the importance of the in vivo studies before speculating as to possible chemotherapeutic efficacy,” he said. Such a footnote, he continued, might read, “At the suggestion of the authors the effect of in vivo tests of streptomycin on
M. tuberculosis
is now being studied by Feldman, Hinshaw and Heilman, Mayo Foundation, Rochester, Minnesota. The results of their study will be the subject of an early report.” The footnote was printed in the paper, but without the last sentence. Waksman had successfully concluded his first move to control the story of the discovery of streptomycin.

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’daccept her as a substitute. Schatz agreed, and they set off for the Lilac

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