Experiment Eleven (29 page)

The most disappointing response for Schatz came from his former professor C. B. van Niel, at the Hopkins Marine Station in California. Van Niel concluded that the discovery of streptomycin had been, like that of penicillin, a “happy accident” and, as such, was not worthy in itself of a Nobel Prize. He found “
ample justification
” for the selection of Waksman for the award based on his “many and major additional contributions.” This “enormous output” was the work “not merely of a hard-working enthusiast and compiler, but of a true scientist, scholar, and master.” In conclusion, he was “satisfied that this award does not constitute a serious injustice to Dr. Schatz.” Van Niel sent a copy to Schatz with a penned note: “Dear Al, This is my well-considered opinion, not lightly arrived at. Very best to you, Vivian and etc. Yours, Kees.”

One of the more thoughtful replies, and certainly one based on greater knowledge of the discovery than that of most of the other scientists, came from an unexpected source: William Feldman of the Mayo Clinic. He had not been on Schatz's appeal list, but had read a copy of the appeal sent to a friend. He sent two replies, the first to Schatz. He was “
disappointed
” that Schatz had not been named as a “co-recipient,” he wrote. “It always seemed to me, without being in possession of the details, that your contribution to the discovery and development of certain important basic facts was quite indivisible from the contribution of Doctor Waksman.”

In a second, formal reply to Stern, the organizer of the appeal, Feldman said that “from my knowledge” of Schatz's part in the discovery, “it would seem just and proper that any award recognizing solely this contribution should be conferred jointly” on Waksman and Schatz. But he asked whether it was “definitely known” whether the Nobel Prize was “especially in recognition of the
discovery
[emphasis added] of streptomycin, or was it in recognition of Dr. Waksman's distinguished achievements of a long professional career pertaining largely to investigations [into] the microbiology of the soil from which streptomycin finally emerged? This
distinction is extremely important
and the exact wording of the citation should be known before any protest can properly be formulated.”

Overall, Feldman felt that the protest was “most unwise.” The people in Stockholm should be given a chance to clarify the award first, he argued.
He declined to be a part of the proposed resolution, but he had identified the problem. The citation was for the “discovery of streptomycin.”

AT SCHATZ'S COLLEGE,
Elmer Reinthaler pressed the Nobel Committee for a reply, again listing the two key 1944 discovery papers plus a third paper from 1946 on the different strains of
S. griseus
that produced streptomycin, also with Schatz as the lead author. Referring to the committee's apparent lack of access to all the relevant material, Reinthaler wrote, “We think you will agree with us that mere procedural technicalities should not permit what would constitute a serious injustice to a scientist, and conceal from the scientific and lay world the facts surrounding the discovery of streptomycin.”

On November 14, the committee replied. Vice President Reinthaler's letter had been discussed at a faculty meeting, and “it was
generally regretted
that part of the information given in your letter had not been accessible to the members of the faculty, since it had not been published in any scientific journal.” The committee was apparently specifically referring to Schatz's doctoral thesis, which had laid out his work and, indeed, had not been published by Rutgers, but also to the patent and the settlement of the lawsuit between Schatz and Waksman. “It may interest you to know,” the letter continued, “that numerous American colleagues who have been invited to make proposals about the Nobel prize have suggested the name of Dr. Waksman, though none of them has proposed Doctor Schatz.” The committee told Reinthaler that the Nobel rules made it impossible to reconsider the prize. According to those rules, the decision made in October could not be altered and “no protest shall lie against the award of an adjudicating body.”

ALTHOUGH WAKSMAN MADE
no public comment about Schatz's petition, he was well aware of it. Several colleagues who had received copies of the letter to the Nobel Committee had written him expressing their support. One former student said that the appeal to the committee had “filled [him] with disgust,” and he could “find no better place to file such a letter than with the trash in my wastebasket. Undoubtedly, such
low attempts by little
men must grieve you deeply, and it is entirely beyond my comprehension how a pupil who like a baby was taught the first steps in the field of microbiology by a great Master, can consent to such blows ... The Nobel committee could have made no nobler choice and it was fully deserved.”

Looking over the information that Reinthaler had sent the committee, Waksman was outraged. He told Russell Watson that he wanted to sue Reinthaler and Schatz for libel. Watson
advised strongly against any litigation
“of any kind at the present time, assuming that the quoted sections of the National Agricultural College letter are libelous.” The college's appeal appeared “to have been abortive,” and any “litigation would revive public discussion of the Schatz case with some degree of unpleasant notoriety.”

Waksman was clearly agitated, imagining that somehow Albert Schatz was going to derail his Nobel Prize. But he had no cause for concern; a compromise was in the wind. A colleague, Stuart Mudd, a professor of microbiology at the University of Pennsylvania, had suggested a way out of the mess the Nobel Committee had created: Why award the prize specifically for the discovery? He had written the committee that he was “delighted” the prize had gone to Waksman and “could hardly imagine a more appropriate award.” He praised Waksman's “extraordinary foresight and rationally conceived planning,” which had “systematically explored the antagonism and associations between microorganisms for at least 25 years.”

He assumed that the award was “based on this long and arduous, reasoned investigation quite as much as upon the fortunate chance by which Dr. Waksman finally recognized streptomycin.” He did not “presume to judge the intimate relationship” between Waksman and Schatz, although he had not been “favorably impressed” by Schatz's “conduct throughout the whole affair.”

Then Mudd suggested a compromise. “The fact that at least in America Dr. Waksman's award was publicized as ‘for the discovery of streptomycin' in my opinion over-emphasizes the happy event at the expense of the
long-term rational effort
and opens the way to the kind of criticism Dr. Schatz's associates have made.” He added, respectfully, “If, as I assume to be the case, the Nobel Committee takes into account the whole course of the scientist's investigations as well as the happy and perhaps sometimes accidental dramatic benefits that result from this, I think it would be beneficial
to make this clear in announcing the award.” Mudd sent a copy to Waksman, who replied immediately.

“I certainly would have been very happy if the Nobel committee had taken into account my whole past work rather than the particular instance of the isolation of streptomycin,” he wrote. It was unfortunate, but “quite inevitable.” Feldman and Hinshaw, he said, rather than Schatz, should have been considered. “The latter was just an assistant, who
deserves no greater share
in the program of antibiotics than many of my other students.”

The Nobel Committee scrambled to alter its original citation. Dr. Arvid Wallgren of the Royal Caroline Institute, who was due to introduce Waksman at the ceremonies in December, was asked by the committee to investigate Schatz's background. Time was short, and he turned to Waksman for help. Waksman was, after all, the de facto Nobel Prize winner.

On November 6, Wallgren wrote Waksman asking for his comments on the “data” he had received from Dr. Reinthaler at the National Agricultural College. “Of course, there is no question of any influence of the contents of the received letter [from Schatz's college] on the opinion of the Caroline Institute,” he assured Waksman. But he had a problem. “In my speech
I have to reject this attack
.” Wallgren asked Waksman for comments as soon as possible, as he had to deliver his draft speech in two weeks.

Waksman, far from recusing himself because of an obvious conflict of interest, was ready, even eager, to oblige. He sent Wallgren a three-page “statement regarding the participation of Dr. Albert Schatz in the discovery of streptomycin.” Waksman had originally prepared this document for his 1950 lawsuit with Schatz. In it, he asserted that Schatz had “made no independent discovery ... [and had] merely followed detailed instructions by Dr. Waksman.” Schatz had known “very little about the problem to which he was to be assigned when he returned from the army in June 1943” and was “no more entitled to any special consideration” than any of the twenty or more other graduate students and assistants who had helped in the solution of the problem of streptomycin.

The document included a description of the alleged break-in to the laboratory by Schatz's Uncle Joe in 1946, when he “carried off certain valuable documents, for which he can be liable for serious damage.” It contained a hearsay report, again from 1946, by the hired researcher for the Rutgers PR Department, that Schatz had once said, “Certainly, I had nothing to do
with the practical development of streptomycin.” Waksman also accused Schatz of being unstable. He said that the Department of Soil Microbiology had “in its possession” evidence concerning Schatz's behavior in two jobs after he left Rutgers that “when placed in the hands of Brooklyn College might make his position there of doubtful tenure.” And he added that Schatz was now at a “farm school” of “rather limited academic standing.” (Waksman's report was first written when Schatz was still at Brooklyn College.)

The document warned of possible legal action, apparently either by Rutgers or by Waksman himself. “Dr. Schatz has taken an attitude unworthy of an educated person and especially one for whom Dr. Waksman has done so much. Should he attempt to misinterpret the facts in any way at all in the public press he will be liable of [
sic
] defamation of character, and he and those associates with him will be held in libel suit.”

Waksman ended by saying to Wallgren, “I leave it to you to
draw your own conclusions
as to the motives prompting Dr. Reinthaler's letter.”

In a postscript, Waksman said he was “taking the liberty” of sending a copy of his letter and his statement to Professor Nanna Svartz. She was also a member of the faculty of the Caroline Institute, and someone whom Waksman had first met on his trip to Stockholm in 1946.

Wallgren was happy
to bring the matter to a conclusion in time for the award ceremony. He thanked Waksman for relating what he accepted as the true story about Schatz's contribution to the discovery. He also told Waksman the award of the Nobel prize would not be reconsidered.

BEFORE HE COULD
collect his prize, Waksman had to deal with one more problem from Schatz. Quite coincidentally, in November 1952, Schatz published a grade school book about microbes with a former fellow professor at Brooklyn College named Sarah Riedman. The book was titled
The Story of Microbes
and was a simple explanation of microscopic life and how it affects us—yeast in food, for example—with sections on how to breed and study microbes at home and references to the pioneers of bacteriology: Louis Pasteur, Joseph Lister, and Robert Koch. The style was friendly and the illustrations childlike.

A brief review in
Newsweek
read, “At one point, however, the book lapses briefly into the
self-conscious, tight-lipped
type of a scientific report. And
well it might. In 1943, a particular microbe which normally grows in the soil was found to produce a chemical effective against bacteria that are not harmed by penicillin. This microbial product was named streptomycin. Not until readers get to the dust jacket do they learn whose research led to the discovery of streptomycin; none other than the co-author, Albert Schatz.”

The book came off Harper & Brothers' press in November 1952 and was due to be published on December 3, a week before Waksman was to receive his prize in Stockholm. Waksman heard about the book, and saw it as yet another attempt by Schatz to win recognition for himself as a codiscoverer of streptomycin, an attempt that, in Waksman's view, could still spoil his Nobel ceremony. Waksman was again in a litigious mood. He wanted to sue Schatz, to stop “any recurrence of such harassment.”

As he was about to board the plane for Stockholm, Waksman called Russell Watson, asking the lawyer to look at the possibilities of stopping the distribution of the book by threatening to sue Schatz for libel. While trying to cool Waksman's desire to sue, Watson took the request seriously and telephoned Frank MacGregor, the president of Harper.

The publisher's publicity sheet had repeated the description on the dust jacket. “At the age of twenty-three Dr. Schatz was responsible for the research which resulted in the discovery of the miracle drug Streptomycin.” Watson asserted that the statement was untrue and libelous and offered to send over facts to back up his assertions. McGregor referred the matter to Harper's lawyers. They called Watson in the middle of December, by which time Waksman had received his prize and had left Sweden.

The lawyers doubted the claim of libel, and Watson did not press the point. Advising Dr. Lewis Webster Jones, the new president of Rutgers, of the conclusion of the affair, Watson wrote that in his judgment Schatz was “a
dog yapping at the heels
of a great world figure and should be ignored.”

SCHATZ'S EFFORTS TO
enlist top names to his side, including van Niel and Feldman, had failed. The organizer of the appeal, Kurt Stern, wrote to him, “It just goes to show that few individuals, whether scientists or laymen, are willing to go on record in public statements concerning matters which are of a controversial nature. Old Dr. Berliner was right when he said that scientists are ‘a curious mixture of a
mimosa and a porcupine
.'” Stern asked Schatz what they should do next, but warned that the “response of our
‘stars' augurs ill.” He suggested that a direct appeal to the king of Sweden was still open.