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colleagues in the department for their “friendly cooperation.”
    The text mentioned that one of the strains had come from the swab of a chicken’s throat, and Schatz’s notebook made two references to the culture’s having come from Doris Jones. He had written Jones into the history books. A final note said, “For the sake of completeness in the treatment of subject matter, a few experiments carried out in collaboration with Miss Elizabeth Bugie and Miss H. Christine Reilly have been included.” Waksman was, of course, one of the examiners of his thesis, but there is no record of his making any comment.
    Schatz thought that his thesis was the document which the outside world would rely on for evidence that he was the one who had actually discovered streptomycin, and he thought that his name coming first on the two key scientific papers written up from his thesis would support that claim, but he was in for a shock.
    While Schatz was working in his basement laboratory, Dr. Waksman was upstairs in his office writing up his own account of the discovery. In March 1945, he published his first book on microbe wars, a masterly 350-page compilation of scientific papers going back to the first 1890 experiments with actinomycetes and forward to Schatz’s discovery of streptomycin. The book,
Microbial Antagonisms and Antibiotic Substances
, described Schatz’s discovery as follows: “ Certain strains of
Streptomyces griseus produce an antibiotic substance, designated streptomycin, that is also active against both Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria.” Because of its low toxicity it had “great promise of practical application.” (In 1943, Waksman and a colleague reclassified the actinomycetes.
A. griseus
was put into a new genera, Streptomyces . Thus, Schatz’s
A. griseus
may now appear as
S. griseus
, depending on the original text.) The name Albert Schatz did not appear in the book, only in the bibliography.
    With the book’s publication, Waksman began to give interviews to the popular media, portraying himself as the “discoverer” of streptomycin and Schatz as “one of his assistants.” A breathless account in
Liberty Magazine
titled “Keep Your Eye on Streptomycin” was a “preliminary report on what is potentially the biggest medical news since penicillin ... Streptomycin appears to open the way to the conquest of all
infectious diseases ...Potentially, swift cures for everything from watermelon wilt to infantile paralysis lie hidden in the grubby soil.”
    Streptomycin was also said to be effective against undulant fever, which under the name of Bang’s disease cost cattle breeders $30 million a year. Nearly two thousand cases a year in the United States of the sometimes fatal tularemia might be cured with streptomycin. There appeared to be an excellent chance that streptomycin would be an unparalleled weapon against plague and leprosy, hog cholera and Dutch elm disease. But “its greatest, most exhilarating accomplishment is its action against the tubercle bacillus, which causes tuberculosis.”
    IF SCHATZ SUBMITTED to this loss of stature, his parents and especially his mother’s brother, Uncle Joe, were outraged to find him relegated to the level of an assistant to the “discoverer,” Waksman. Uncle Joe had recently qualified as a dentist and, being of the kind known disparagingly in the profession as “an advertising dentist,” understood a thing or two about publicity. Although he never took credit for what happened next, the front-page headline on the July 2 issue of the Schatz family’s local paper, the
Passaic Herald-News
, declared, PASSAIC YOUTH DISCOVERS DRUG THAT MAY STAMP OUT DREAD TB. A reporter had visited the Schatz family at home and found “a slim youth of 25, a product of Passaic’s public schools and now engaged in research in soil microbiology,” who was “on his