Selman Waksman's soil research found a cure for tuberculosis

Person: Selman Waksman
Lived: 1888–1973
Field: Microbiology
From: Russian-American

The story

Selman Waksman was born in 1888 in Priluka in the Russian Empire, now Nova Pryluka in Ukraine, and emigrated to the United States in 1910, where he spent four decades as a soil microbiologist at Rutgers University. For generations tuberculosis had been one of the deadliest diseases in the world, and doctors had no drug that could cure it. Penicillin, the new wonder drug of the early 1940s, could not touch the tuberculosis germ, and no usable antibiotic yet worked against many other dangerous bacteria.

Waksman had studied the Streptomyces group of soil organisms since his student days. In 1939 he and his colleagues began systematic studies of how microorganisms living in soil affect the bacteria that cause tuberculosis. His laboratory tested many microbial products against many different germs in a planned grid of experiments. They found that one soil bacterium, Streptomyces griseus, held back the growth of the tuberculosis germ. On October 19, 1943, Waksman's doctoral student Albert Schatz isolated streptomycin from it, in a project funded by Merck.

The Rutgers team reported the discovery in January 1944, and doctors at the Mayo Clinic soon began testing it. In 1946–1948 Britain's Medical Research Council ran a trial of streptomycin against pulmonary tuberculosis that is widely regarded as the first randomised curative trial in medicine. Streptomycin was also the first effective drug against many so-called Gram-negative bacteria.

Waksman is credited with giving the word 'antibiotic' its modern meaning, using it to describe germ-fighting substances produced by living microorganisms. His laboratory went on to isolate more than 15 antibiotics. He received the 1952 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of streptomycin, and Schatz was later formally recognised as co-discoverer. Income from licensing the patents funded a foundation for microbiological research and the Institute of Microbiology at Rutgers, now named after Waksman.

Streptomycin is still used today, usually with other drugs, against tuberculosis and infections such as plague and tularaemia. It is on the World Health Organization's List of Essential Medicines.

Why it matters

Streptomycin made tuberculosis curable for the first time, and the systematic screening of soil microbes that Waksman pioneered led to many other antibiotics.