Experiment Eleven (17 page)

___________

MEANWHILE, THE RUTGERS
PR Department had been busy burnishing Waksman's image. It was staging a radio drama of the discovery of streptomycin, starring Hollywood actors, to be aired from the Rutgers campus. The press release referred to “Dr. Selman A. Waksman, Rutgers University's
world famed scientist
, whose discovery of the wonder drug, streptomycin, is celebrated in the drama, ‘
Winner Takes Life
,' a
Cavalcade of America
broadcast, sponsored by the Du Pont Company.”

Waksman was to attend the first airing, on April 14 and 15, and meet the Hungarian-born film star Paul Lukas, who would play him. Lukas had won an Academy Award for his role in the 1943 movie
Watch on the Rhine
, in which he had played an American working against the Nazis. He was also a charter member of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, a group that lobbied against communist influence in Hollywood.

More than twelve thousand people were expected to attend the four performances at the Rutgers University gymnasium. Free tickets were being offered to local companies. Employees at five DuPont plants in New Jersey, together with their families and friends, as well as students and faculty of Rutgers, received tickets. Albert and Vivian Schatz were not invited—even though “Al Schatz” appeared as a character in the show, and he was living in New York City, an hour's train journey away.

THE PLAY OPENS
toward the end of World War Two, with an army general and Waksman discussing the discovery of streptothricin. It looked “very promising,” Waksman tells the general, but unfortunately it turned out to be toxic. In the next scene, Waksman is talking to “one of his assistants, Al Schatz,” in their laboratory, discussing how to find new antibiotics among the actinomycetes. Together they look at several cultures of
Streptomyces
, some of which produce antibiotics that “pack a wallop.” In a separate scene, at a military hospital, a young soldier is dying from a bacterial infection and desperate for a new medicine. Back in the laboratory, Waksman and Schatz continue their experiments and find one strain that produces an antibiotic effective against TB. Waksman warns Schatz this is only the beginning, more tests must be carried out. He calls in another “assistant,” Miss Bugie, to work on the problem. Soon they have enough of the new drug for trials on mice. It works. Mice with
Salmonella
intestinal poisoning
recover. They look “frisky as a squirrel,” and the untreated mice die. Waksman names the new drug streptomycin. In the final scene, the sick soldier is given streptomycin and also makes a miraculous recovery.

IN THE FALL
of 1948, Schatz joined van Niel's lab, but without the Rutgers fellowship that Waksman had indicated he might be able to arrange. In fact, there is no evidence that Waksman ever asked for one. Schatz relied instead on the GI Bill for ex-servicemen, which gave him about one hundred dollars a month. Waksman
offered additional support
from “our own funds,” if Schatz needed it. Waksman had just received a second personal royalty check for $89,617, making a total of $142,809—more than ten times his salary.

At the end of August, he sent Schatz another check for $500. Again, Schatz thanked him profusely, but he said that he could accept it only as a loan. With their savings and the GI Bill assistance, “we ought to be able to skimp along.” He appreciated Waksman's kind offer for the remaining two trimesters, but could not bring himself “
to impose further
upon your generosity unless my own funds become exhausted.”

Schatz could not have been happier with his move to the West Coast, where some of the brighter stars of American microbiology worked with Dr. van Niel. He had finally settled on his project:
Hydrobacteria
, a weird group of microbes that feed on hydrogen instead of carbon or nitrogen, like most of their cousins. Schatz's task was to isolate these hydrogen eaters and find out how to use them to create water, or moisture, in enclosed environments. He was also upgrading his skills in classes on calculus and physical chemistry and giving himself courses in thermodynamics and theoretical organic chemistry.

As he had no fellowship, the GI Bill check was his only steady source of income. Vivian was working about fifteen hours a week keeping the laboratory glassware in order, which brought in a little extra. Together they were “in good financial condition” and foresaw “no difficulties for the remainder of the year.” Leaving Sloan-Kettering had been the right thing to do. In spirit, he was as “
rich as Croesus
.”

Going after jobs that paid a decent salary had been a mistake, Schatz wrote Waksman. He blamed himself for not listening to his former professor. He recalled that Waksman had once advised him to take a course
with van Niel. “The decision was entirely my own and I have only myself to blame.”

Now he and Vivian were “both fine, physically, financially, mentally and in all other ways.” They were “collaborating on a
most important experiment
”—their first child, due the following year. Schatz spent all his time in the lab, as he liked to do, obsessed with his new project to the exclusion of all others, including any thought of streptomycin.

When Waksman sent him a copy of the recently published collected scientific papers on the drug, Schatz replied that he did not have the time, or need, to follow this field as closely as before. “I simply had no idea that so very much had already been published on streptomycin,” he wrote. He was working so hard that he had exhausted the supply of flasks in the lab and “consequently [had] decreed this Sunday a holiday to be enjoyed away from the laboratory.” This was a first since he had arrived at Pacific Grove, a regular day off.

Schatz did get himself in the local newspaper, however. The
Monterey Peninsula Herald
's Round and About columnist, Ritch Lovejoy, went to see him. “Last week,” Lovejoy wrote, “I went over to Hopkins Marine Station to meet Dr. Albert Schatz, 28, jet-black-bearded, short, husky and largely responsible for the discovery of Streptomycin.” It was at Rutgers University, Lovejoy informed his readers, that in “collaboration with Dr S.A. Waksman and Miss Elizabeth Bugie,” Schatz had developed streptomycin. Although he would have liked to tell his readers more of this important discovery, Lovejoy added, the fact that Schatz was “
pretty tired of hearing about it
led us to drop the subject.”

Schatz was now “devoting his time to microbial physiology,” mainly with his
Hydrobacteria
. “A number have been isolated before, and whether the ones Schatz is watching have been described before, he doesn't know yet. He had found two—one shaped like a rod with a tail, and one without a tail. The tailed microbe travels around and the other just floated lazily in the water. They both burn up hydrogen, just like a car burns up gas and you and I burn up carbohydrates. In all cases, the result is energy.”

Waksman apparently saw this article. It must have been sent to him by someone in the lab, because a copy is in his Rutgers archive. He made no comment.

___________

IN THE MEANTIME,
Seymour Hutner, a microbiologist at the independent research unit, from Haskins Laboratories in New York City, had alerted Schatz to a vacant teaching and research position at Brooklyn College to follow his stay at van Niel's lab. Schatz got the job—this time without Waksman's help. But Waksman was encouraging, as always. He was “
delighted indeed
” to learn about Schatz's progress and “particularly pleased” to learn of his Brooklyn appointment. “It certainly does credit to the members of the appointment committee of that institution who were able to recognize your merit for the position in question and to give you the proper appointment of Assistant Professor to which you are fully entitled.”

ON SEPTEMBER 21, 1948, U.S. PATENT
No. 2,449,866, for “
streptomycin and process of preparation
,” was granted to the inventors Selman Waksman and Albert Schatz. Of course, the “inventors” had already assigned their rights to the Rutgers Foundation, so they in fact owned no part of the new drug. And the four-page document, written in the dry, technical language of patent law, gave no hint of the division of labor. In case anyone should be in any doubt, however, as to which of the two inventors to attach greater importance, the first paragraph stated that streptomycin came from strains of the microorganism
Actinomyces griseus
, which was “first isolated from the soil and characterized by one of the present applicants, S. A. Waksman, and is described in his publication in Soil Science 8, 71, (1919).” In other words, without Waksman's earlier discovery, the present one would not have happened.

In reality, the Russian researcher Alexander Krainsky had been the first to identify the organism
A. griseus
, in 1914. And Dr. Waksman's strain of
A. griseus
was not a streptomycin producer. But Waksman had made the claim in his own behalf so often now that no one complained. This was the cold war. The patent was already paying royalties—and would continue to do so for the next decade or so, until it ran out. Waksman, and his heirs after his death, were guaranteed a 20 percent share of whatever the Rutgers Foundation made from its 2.5 percent royalty. The professor would become rich as well as famous; the Rutgers Foundation coffers would be filled in a manner that the tiny college had never dreamed of. And Schatz, Waksman's “co-inventor,” would get precisely nothing. He had not even
been paid the one dollar due to him for signing over the patent to the Rutgers Foundation in 1946.

Neither Waksman nor the foundation would notify him that the patent had been granted, a milestone in the history of medicine that would be hailed in 1961 by the
New York Times Magazine
as one of the “
ten patents that shaped the world
,” along with those for moldable plastics, gasoline, the telephone, Edison's lamp, rockets, man-made fibers, powered flight, the vacuum tube, and atomic power.

Waksman had no intention, either now or later, of informing Schatz; such information in the hands of his diligent but unpredictable researcher might encourage awkward questions as to where exactly the royalties were going, not to mention the provenance of his five-hundred-dollar personal checks to Schatz.

THE STREPTOMYCIN PATENT
was indeed poised to shape the future of the drug industry. There had been no patent on penicillin. In a very British manner, Alexander Fleming had never considered applying for a patent for a drug so desperately needed by humanity. Howard Florey had opposed Ernst Chain on the same grounds when Chain had suggested they should seek a patent. Even if they had applied, though, the application would have been rejected. Under British and U.S. law, patents were not awarded for products of nature, which everyone acknowledged penicillin to be. Moreover, a patent had to be applied for within a year of the discovery's public announcement. Penicillin was announced by Fleming in 1929, but by the time it was “rediscovered” and finally produced in 1940, more than a decade had passed. It was out of time.

However, the discovery of streptomycin demonstrated that Fleming's penicillin was not an isolated phenomenon; there were billions of microbes lurking in the soil, the water, and the air, in sewage plants and compost piles, and even in the gullets of chickens, and any of them might provide a wonder drug. Until now, the pharmaceutical industry had operated with a
poorly stocked medicine chest
of fluids, ointments, snake oil, and exotic-plant extracts. None of those—morphine, quinine, digitalis, insulin, codeine, aspirin, arsenicals, nitroglycerin, and compounds of mercury—was a cure, only a palliative. In contrast, antibiotics actually cured people of deadly infectious diseases, and the streptomycin patent showed the way. It meant
companies that discovered antibiotics stood to reap handsome profits. Selman Waksman, now a scientist-entrepreneur, played a crucial role.

When Waksman first applied for patents for his antibiotics found at Rutgers, the U.S. Patent Office examiners raised the “
products of nature
” issue. All courts, including the Supreme Court, agreed that anything made by or found in nature—a metal, for example, or a plant, a piece of wood, or a natural dye—was in the public domain, and no inventor or discoverer could claim it as his own. However, there was no precise definition of a product of nature, and no agreed-on point at which a natural product, changed by human hands, ceased to be natural. On this key matter the courts were silent.

Waksman had some experience with this debate, from when he worked for the Takamine Laboratory from 1918 to 1920. In 1903, Takamine had won a patent case concerning adrenaline, which was a “natural” product of
adrenal glands
from slaughtered sheep and cattle. The company's success would ease the passage of patents granted to the future antibiotics industry and to today's biotechnology companies. The company's founder, Japanese-born Jokichi Takamine, would become known as the “pioneer of American biotechnology.”