Experiment Eleven (19 page)

It was time to demand answers. Schatz was now twenty-nine years old. Vivian was about to give birth to their first child. But what would be gained by pressing such a demand? More recognition for his discovery? A share of the spoils? He had told Waksman that these things didn't matter to him and that the life he had chosen to lead with Vivian was simple; he had no need for extra funds. More important than funds, however, was Waksman's help in passing on news about job openings and writing recommendations. Upsetting his professor by asking awkward questions could put this relationship at risk.

Much as he feared the possible consequences, though, one weekend at the end of January 1949, Schatz sat in his laboratory at the Hopkins Marine Station and wrote a seven-page letter to Waksman. In the past, he had always confided in Waksman about everything, in both his professional and his personal life; it had seemed a natural thing to do. He had sought Waksman's wisdom without question. But this time it was different. He was so nervous that the letter was repetitive, the words at times awkward.

He thanked Waksman for the notice of another job opportunity and
reported on his latest research project. Then he switched abruptly to “
several matters
” that had been making him “more and more uneasy.” He begged Waksman's “indulgence” for what was going to be “a rather lengthy letter and the imposition” that it would take on his time.

“I earnestly hope you will not feel ... that I have stopped trusting in you ... You once told me that in certain respects you have been as a father to me. Since that is true, it is in this sense, therefore, that I am writing to you as a son ... I so very much want our friendship to continue that I am giving voice to what might otherwise become matters of an upsetting nature,” Schatz wrote.

By signing so many papers, he said, he had “been slowly signing myself out of streptomycin completely.” He had done so willingly because Waksman had told him often “how easily streptomycin might slip through our fingers and we then become only briefly-mentioned names in an ever-lengthening bibliography. To a large extent that is exactly what has happened to me.”

He did not regret this “slow but progressive dissociation from the discovery of streptomycin.” It was enough for him that it had “alleviated human suffering,” he said.

Then Schatz brought Waksman back to the day at Rutgers in January 1945, when they had both sworn as “co-inventors” on the U.S. patent application. “You afterwards shook hands with me and stated that we were partners in streptomycin but that neither of us would profit financially from the discovery.”

But his friends, including “laymen, attorneys, and professionals (microbiologists, biochemists, and the like),” had bombarded him with questions about the streptomycin patent. Who had received the royalties? What was the Rutgers Research and Endowment Foundation? Since he knew nothing about the foundation, he “felt like a damn fool, plainly and simply like a damn fool.”

He didn't even know whether the streptomycin patent had been granted, or why Betty Bugie had been excluded from the patent, although her name was on the original paper announcing the discovery. “I believe you will understand how confused and perplexed I have become,” he wrote.

As to the discovery itself, Schatz reminded Waksman, “You yourself know, better than anyone else, to what a considerable extent my own personal efforts are responsible for the discovery. You yourself told me six
years ago that was why you felt it only fair and just that I be accorded senior authorship on the first paper announcing the discovery. You know the long hours and hard work I put in. You will recall on how many mornings you came to the laboratory at 8:30 or so and found the autoclave still very hot from my having worked through the night.

“All data of the original experiments of
A. griseus
and streptomycin are in my own handwriting in my laboratory notebook, which is now in your possession. I therefore feel, in all modesty, that streptomycin is, to a large and considerable extent, the fruit of my labors.”

His anguish had become overwhelming, and he could not continue to sign over “unknown amounts of monies to which I am otherwise legally entitled to an organization about which I know practically nothing.” And he would be reconsidering those documents he had already signed—unless he got satisfactory answers to a long list of thirteen questions, which he laid out one by one. They included questions about the foundation, the royalties, the foreign patents, and whether anyone had benefited personally. He felt he had a “lawful basis” for these requests because he was the senior author on the first streptomycin paper; such a request was “morally justified” in view of his work on streptomycin.

In case Waksman should read his letter as a threat, Schatz hastened to add, “I want you to know that I have, up to the present date of this letter, never approached anyone for advice on these matters. Until now, any suggestions and opinions which have been directed to me by others have not only been entirely unsolicited, but have even been discouraged by me.” He was apparently referring to his family, and especially to Uncle Joe.

“I earnestly hope that you will be good enough to help settle these matters to our mutual satisfaction in the shortest possible time,” he continued, “as unilateral action on my part would be not only difficult but embarrassing.”

He had not yet decided what course of action to take. “To a large measure that will depend on your reply to this letter ... But regardless of what will transpire, I can promise that I shall be true to my own convictions. Sincerely, Albert Schatz.”

WAKSMAN'S HARD-EARNED, COMFORTABLE
world, the personal fame and fortune he had amassed for the discovery of streptomycin, suddenly looked
fragile. The question of who had discovered the drug, a matter he had thought successfully buried, had suddenly struggled back to life. His secret about the royalties might now be revealed, not merely to Schatz but to the world. How the revelation would be received at Rutgers, or at the National Academy of Sciences, or the other halls of high science in Europe, or the universities and colleges and hospitals that had rewarded and praised him for such a wonderful medical discovery was no doubt on his mind, as were his prospects for a Nobel prize.

Waksman's reply was short and angry. “
To say that I was amazed
to read [your letter] is to put it quite mildly,” he began. “I can assure you that it caused me considerable pain. I thought that this whole matter had been settled and I was hoping that it would not come up again.”

Waksman was apparently referring to the confrontation between the two men in the spring of 1946, when they had assigned the patent to the Rutgers Foundation. Drawing a distinction between the isolation of the microbe and turning it into a drug, Waksman wrote, “You know very well that you had nothing whatever to do with the practical development of streptomycin ... You assured me of that yourself when you were about to leave New Brunswick in the middle of 1946. [He was referring to the letter dictated by Waksman to his secretary.]” He said Schatz had been given “all the credit that any student can ever hope to obtain.” Schatz “knew quite well” that the methods for streptomycin's isolation had been worked out for streptothricin, and even the name
streptomycin
had existed before Schatz's return from the army.

Waksman insisted that Schatz's contribution to streptomycin consisted “only of the isolation of one of the two cultures” and in helping to isolate the crude drug. This was only a “very small part” of the development of streptomycin.

Waksman warned Schatz that this “whole matter” would now be referred to the attorney of the Rutgers Foundation. He was sending Schatz's letter to Russell Watson, attorney of the Rutgers Research and Endowment Foundation. “If I write to you again it will be in a far more formal manner than this letter.”

And yet, angry as he was, Waksman appealed to Schatz, requesting that they settle their differences without the glare of publicity. He hoped Schatz would “reconsider this whole situation before it is too late. You have
made a good beginning as a promising scientist, you have a great future before you, and you cannot afford to ruin it.”

CLEARLY, WAKSMAN HAD
never anticipated the extent of Schatz's rebellious mood. The other patents, for actinomycin and streptothricin, had been assigned by Boyd Woodruff without a murmur. But then, Waksman had arranged for a good job for Woodruff at Merck. And Woodruff had been a great success at the company. His temperament was different from Schatz's. He liked being part of a large organization. He was conformist. Schatz was the opposite. He liked to work on his own; he disliked “pressure from above,” as he had once put it.

If Waksman had waited for a day or two, Russell Watson might have tempered his reply. Schatz's letter had presented Waksman with a stark choice: challenge Schatz or accommodate him. He could have given Schatz information on his deals with Rutgers and with Merck and acknowledged that Schatz was indeed the codiscoverer of streptomycin. And then, because he was basically in charge of the foundation's affairs—its staff never did anything without his approval—he could have arranged to give Schatz either a fellowship from the royalty fund or a share in the royalties. The sums required for such an accommodation would have been tiny in comparison with the amounts coming into the university coffers and his own pocket.

As for the five-hundred-dollar checks, Waksman could have said that the patent had been granted the previous September and further explained that the funds were only now able to be distributed. Under such a strategy, Schatz would have had no grounds for the legal action he was clearly contemplating.

Waksman was not prepared to take these steps. In his view, his personal deals with Merck and the Rutgers Foundation were
none of Schatz's business
. Selman Waksman was a professor of the old school. He was the master. His students were his apprentices. Instead of acknowledging Schatz's concerns, he scolded him.

But Schatz was no longer a callow researcher; he had broadened his scientific horizons as well as his understanding of human nature. In the three short years since he'd left Rutgers, he had dealt with life in other
laboratories, under the direction of other bosses. As a civil servant in the Albany state laboratory, he had experienced the incompetence of local government bureaucracy. In Manhattan, he had been a researcher for a private nonprofit group and witnessed what he had seen as wasted effort and wasted funds. In California, he had encountered a brilliant academic community that thrived on the sparkling intellect and generous nature of its charismatic leader, C. B. van Niel.

Perhaps more important than the work experience, though, was the active support from his family, and from Vivian. Schatz had found a strong-willed woman in Vivian Rosenfeld. Vivian had an acute sense of right and wrong, of social justice and civil rights. She had witnessed how hard her husband had worked in his basement laboratory before successfully isolating streptomycin, and she was determined to see to it that he was treated properly and that his achievements were fully respected. In Albany, she had experienced the long arm of the FBI and watched as other academics had fallen victim to the growing power of Senator Joseph McCarthy and his Un-American Activities Committee. She understood how academic records could be twisted and used for unsavory purposes.

Money was no longer a great concern since Schatz's new job at Brooklyn College, which would begin in the fall, offered a good salary, forty-five hundred dollars a year. All Schatz now sought was due recognition as co-discoverer. He wanted to be properly informed about the royalties, instead of waiting for handouts from Selman Waksman.

FOR WAKSMAN, NOW
aged sixty-one, streptomycin was the greatest achievement of his scientific career. The discovery had transformed him from a successful professor of a barely acknowledged scientific discipline at a modest academic institution into one of the most famous biologists of his era. He had turned down lucrative job offers in industry and posts at other universities. He had used his personal wealth to enhance his own reputation and that of the Department of Soil Microbiology with frequent visits to Europe, as well as trips to Russia and South America. In the process, he had picked up scores of honors and awards, some of them adding considerably to his personal fortune. As a microbiologist, he had been a special adviser to the U.S. government on important military matters. During the war, he had consulted on the role bacteria play in the fouling
of ships' bottoms that reduces speed. He also looked into the bacterial action in steel corrosion. And he was involved in finding ways of reducing damage by molds and fungi to optical, electrical, and other military equipment. He was also involved in finding new sources of agar. The most plentiful source had been a red algae common in eastern Asia, and before the war most of it came from Japan. In these matters, he had found a place for himself at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, where he spent his summers among colleagues from Harvard and MIT.

From his cramped office on the third floor of the Administration Building, Waksman ran his own antibiotic empire. He had personally arranged patents for streptomycin in several foreign countries. The Rutgers administration trusted him to make deals with some of the leading industrialists in the new age of antibiotics and with the increasingly powerful businesses producing pharmaceuticals.

Moreover, as streptomycin had gathered credibility as a cure for TB, Waksman had now been nominated for a Nobel prize four years in a row. He knew he was being considered; he had done his best on his European tours to make his presence felt at the Nobel “court” of the Royal Caroline Institute, in Stockholm. Having Albert Schatz loudly acclaimed as the co-discoverer of streptomycin could interfere with his chances.

If the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine considered that the discovery of streptomycin was indeed worthy of the prize, then it would also have to consider the discovery as a whole, the isolation of the microbe and its development into a drug, as it had done with penicillin. Fleming had discovered penicillin, but Florey and Chain had turned Fleming's accidental observation into the world's first antibiotic. The committee had recognized all three scientists, the maximum number allowed for the prize, according to Alfred Nobel's eccentric will.