- Person
- Selman Waksman
- Lived
- 1888–1973
- Field
- Microbiology
- From
- Russian-American
The story
Selman Waksman built his career on a simple but powerful idea: the soil is full of microorganisms competing with each other, and some of them produce chemicals that kill their rivals. If those chemicals could be found and purified, they might become medicines.
At Rutgers, Waksman's team studied soil microbes, especially a group called actinomycetes, testing what they produced against disease-causing bacteria. Their approach was methodical: they worked through a grid of experiments, with candidate substances along one side and different disease organisms along the other, checking each against each.
The results came steadily. With his students and associates Waksman isolated actinomycin in 1940, clavacin, streptothricin in 1942, streptomycin in 1943, grisein in 1946, neomycin later that decade, and fradicin, candicidin and candidin. Many of the discoveries were made by graduate students working under him, among them H. Boyd Woodruff, Albert Schatz and Hubert Lechevalier. Some proved too toxic for use in people, but streptomycin and neomycin came into wide use against infections in people, animals and plants, and actinomycin D became a cancer drug. Waksman's streptomycin patent was later listed among ten patents that shaped the world.
The American Chemical Society later honoured the work of his laboratory with a National Historic Chemical Landmark for isolating more than 15 antibiotics. Just as important, Waksman introduced systematic screening procedures that other researchers used to find many more antibiotics, and he is credited with giving the word antibiotic its modern meaning, to describe these germ-fighting substances made by microorganisms.
His work turned a laboratory curiosity into a systematic science. The screening procedures he introduced led others to develop many more antibiotics in the years that followed. Waksman himself wrote or co-wrote more than 400 scientific papers and served as president of the American Society for Microbiology. The National Academy of Sciences awards the Selman A. Waksman Award in Microbiology in his honour.
Why it matters
Waksman's methods helped launch the golden age of antibiotic discovery that gave doctors drugs against many once-deadly infections.
About Selman Waksman
Discovered streptomycin, the first effective antibiotic for tuberculosis. Coined the word "antibiotic." Nobel laureate, 1952.
More about Selman Waksman
- Waksman isolated the first antibiotic shown to fight cancerIn 1940 Selman Waksman and H. Boyd Woodruff isolated actinomycin from soil bacteria. Actinomycin D became the first antibiotic shown to have anti-cancer activity.
- Selman Waksman's soil research found a cure for tuberculosisSelman Waksman's search of soil microbes produced streptomycin, the first antibiotic effective against tuberculosis, and he gave the word 'antibiotic' its modern meaning.
- Waksman and his student discovered neomycin in 1949In 1949 Selman Waksman and his student Hubert Lechevalier discovered neomycin at Rutgers. It is still used today in creams, ointments and eye drops.
- Waksman founded marine bacteriology at Woods HoleIn 1931 Selman Waksman organised the division of Marine Bacteriology at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, studying how bacteria recycle nutrients in the sea.
- Waksman used his royalties to build a research instituteIn 1951 Selman Waksman used half of his personal patent royalties to create the Foundation for Microbiology, which helped fund the Institute of Microbiology at Rutgers.
Sources
- Selman Waksman Wikipedia
- About the Waksman Institute Waksman Institute of Microbiology, Rutgers University
- Selman A. Waksman: Biographical NobelPrize.org
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