Experiment Eleven

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Book: Read Experiment Eleven for Free Online
Authors: Peter Pringle
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 encouragementthroughout 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

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