A village in the Pale
Selman Abraham Waksman was born on July 22, 1888, in Nova Pryluka, a small town in the Russian Empire, in what is now Ukraine. It lay within the Pale of Settlement, the region to which the Tsars confined most of their Jewish subjects, and Waksman grew up amid the poverty, restriction, and periodic violence of Jewish life under imperial Russia. His father was often absent and ineffectual; it was his mother, Fradia, who ran the household and drove her only son’s education, hiring tutors and insisting that he learn. The countryside itself was his other teacher. Surrounded by farmland, the boy grew fascinated by the dark, rich earth, how it could be exhausted and restored, how it teemed with unseen life. When his mother died in 1909, and with the door to a Russian university closed to him as a Jew, Waksman, like millions of others, looked west. In 1910, at twenty-two, he sailed for the United States.
A new life in New Jersey soil
Waksman joined relatives who farmed in rural New Jersey, and the land led him to his vocation. Nearby stood Rutgers College, and a Rutgers bacteriologist encouraged the young immigrant to enrol and study agricultural science. Waksman seized the chance. He took a degree in agriculture in 1915 and a master’s the next year, and became a United States citizen in 1916. He then crossed the country to the University of California at Berkeley, where in 1918 he earned a doctorate in biochemistry. He returned to Rutgers as a faculty member and stayed for the rest of his career, building, over decades, the discipline of soil microbiology almost single-handedly. His subject was the staggering, invisible population of a single handful of earth, the bacteria, fungi, and other organisms that decompose dead matter, recycle nutrients, and make soil fertile. For two decades this was patient, unglamorous science, far removed from medicine.
The actinomycetes
Within the soil’s vast microbial population, Waksman became the world’s foremost authority on one group in particular: the actinomycetes, organisms that blur the line between bacteria and fungi and that give freshly turned earth its characteristic smell. He spent years cataloguing them, mapping how they lived, and studying the chemical war they waged. For the soil, he came to understand, is a battlefield. Its microbes exist in ferocious competition, and many survive by manufacturing chemical weapons, substances that kill or suppress their rivals. In the 1930s Waksman watched from a distance as this idea bore fruit elsewhere: penicillin, derived from a mould, was shown to be a microbial product that could kill disease-causing bacteria. Waksman realised that his own life’s work, his deep knowledge of the most chemically aggressive organisms in the soil, pointed straight toward a systematic way to hunt for more such drugs.
A systematic search
Where penicillin had been a celebrated accident, Waksman set out to make antibiotic discovery a deliberate, organised enterprise. Beginning around 1939, he turned his Rutgers laboratory into a screening operation: his students and assistants tested thousands of soil microbes, one after another, against disease-causing bacteria, looking for any that produced a substance capable of killing a pathogen without poisoning the patient. It was laborious, repetitive work, and it needed a worthy target. The greatest prize was tuberculosis, the “white plague” caused by a tough, waxy-coated bacterium against which penicillin was useless. Tuberculosis was then among the deadliest diseases on Earth, filling sanatoria with the slowly dying and killing millions every year. To find something that could defeat the tuberculosis bacillus would be to break one of humanity’s oldest and most feared adversaries. Waksman’s laboratory bent itself to that search.
Streptomycin
In 1943 the search succeeded. Working in Waksman’s laboratory, his graduate student Albert Schatz isolated, from a strain of soil actinomycete, a substance they named streptomycin. In testing it did what nothing safe had done before: it killed the tuberculosis bacterium. Clinical trials soon confirmed the result, and streptomycin became the first effective treatment for tuberculosis, as well as a weapon against plague and other infections that penicillin could not touch. The effect on medicine was immediate and immense. The sanatoria began to empty. A disease that had shadowed human life for thousands of years, that had killed Keats and Chekhov and Orwell, and countless millions of the anonymous poor, became, for the first time, curable. Streptomycin was also the proof of Waksman’s method: that antibiotics could be hunted down systematically, and that the soil was a pharmacy waiting to be read.
A word for a new kind of medicine
Waksman’s laboratory did not stop at streptomycin. Over the following years it isolated other antibiotics, neomycin among them, still in use today, and Waksman gave the world the very vocabulary for this new class of drugs. In 1941 he had defined and popularised the word “antibiotic” to mean a substance, produced by one microorganism, that destroys or inhibits another. The term, and the framework behind it, organised an entire field. Pharmaceutical companies adopted Waksman’s screening approach wholesale, sending collectors to gather soil from around the world and testing it microbe by microbe. The two decades after streptomycin became the golden age of antibiotic discovery, and most of the great families of these drugs were found by following the path Waksman had marked out. He had not merely discovered a cure; he had discovered a reliable way to keep discovering them.
The Nobel, and a bitter dispute
In 1952 Waksman was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of streptomycin, the first antibiotic effective against tuberculosis. But the honour was shadowed by conflict. Albert Schatz, the young graduate student whose bench work had isolated streptomycin, believed he had been denied his due credit and a fair share of the patent royalties, and he sued Waksman and Rutgers. The case was settled: Schatz was legally recognised as a co-discoverer and granted a portion of the royalties. The Nobel committee, however, honoured Waksman alone, and the dispute left a lasting stain on the story and a hard question about how credit should be shared between a laboratory’s director and the students whose hands do the work. It remains one of the more troubling controversies in the history of medical science, and it has been argued over ever since.
Giving the proceeds back
Whatever the merits of the royalty fight, Waksman’s own use of his share was deliberate and generous. Streptomycin earned a great deal of money, and Waksman directed the bulk of his personal royalties not into his own pocket but back into science. He arranged for the funds to endow the Rutgers Institute of Microbiology, later renamed the Waksman Institute, a permanent research centre for the discipline he had founded, ensuring that the field would have a home and a future long after him. He had arrived in the United States a penniless immigrant; he chose to convert the wealth his discovery generated into infrastructure for the next generation of scientists. It was an act consistent with the tradition he came from, the conviction that knowledge, and the means to pursue it, are held in trust, and meant to be passed on rather than hoarded.
The warning he left
Waksman understood his adversary better than most, and he did not believe the war was won. His remark that in the end the microbes would have the last word was not gloom but realism: he knew that bacteria evolve, and that any antibiotic, used widely and carelessly, would eventually meet bacteria able to survive it. Antibiotic resistance, now one of the gravest slow-moving threats in global health, as once-routine infections again become difficult to treat, is precisely the danger Waksman foresaw. His own answer was the one that had produced streptomycin in the first place: keep searching. The soil, and the wider living world, he believed, still held countless undiscovered antimicrobial compounds, and the systematic hunt he had pioneered would have to continue indefinitely, each generation finding new drugs to stay a step ahead of evolving microbes. That race has never ended.
Impact and legacy
It is difficult to overstate what Waksman’s work gave the world. Before antibiotics, a deep cut, a childbirth, a routine operation, or a childhood illness could turn fatal without warning, and tuberculosis alone killed on a scale now hard to imagine. The drugs that flowed from Waksman’s laboratory and his method, streptomycin, neomycin, and the antibiotics that the screening of soil microbes produced in the years that followed, cured diseases that had killed for all of recorded history, and added years to average human life expectancy on every continent. Tuberculosis sanatoria closed; surgery, transplantation, and chemotherapy became possible because infection could finally be controlled. Waksman died on August 16, 1973, at eighty-five. He had begun life in a restricted village in the Pale of Settlement and ended it as a Nobel laureate who had handed humanity one of its most powerful tools against death, and the method to keep forging more.
Sources & further reading
Selman Waksman, Wikipedia · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.