Experiment Eleven (33 page)

If Rutgers and Waksman had known that Uncle Joe had vigorously campaigned for his nephew they would probably have been even more upset, seeing it as yet another subversive maneuver to grab the spotlight. But the citation actually made no claims for Schatz beyond the “co-discoverer” status and had fairly summarized the state of Schatz's career following the lawsuit.

After the Nobel, Schatz stayed on for two years at the small National Agricultural College, covering a “wide variety of problems” to do with “soil fertility, plant diseases, hormones, and a way to diagnose and treat multiple sclerosis.” These were vital pursuits, but they lacked the kind of focus one might expect from a researcher who had made a big discovery. By then Schatz was receiving about twelve thousand dollars a year after taxes from the streptomycin royalties, allowing him to move from one new passion to the next—the kind of basic research he
literally “loved to do
.”

He campaigned against the desirability of fluoride in drinking water, studied the effect of bacteria on dental caries, and developed an interest in water diving and the paranormal. Schatz was also fascinated by the feeding habits of mosses and lichens, by how they use a mysterious chemical action known as chelation (from the Greek
chela
, meaning “claw” or “pincer”), a mechanism whereby microbes break down the minerals on rock surfaces. He published a series of papers on chelating in the
Proceedings of the Pennsylvania Academy of Sciences
, and he wrote an eight-page paper on
copper mosses
, which feed on rocks containing copper, for the
Bryologist
, a journal devoted entirely to liverworts and mosses. Schatz wanted to know how these creatures survived on copper, which is toxic to most microorganisms.

Some of this work had industrial application. With a colleague, he even took out a patent on chelating microbes that might be used in the soil to release minerals useful for plant growth. But that ended unhappily when the National Agricultural College thought that it ought to have been the owner of the patent—even though his colleague did not work for the college and most of the work had been done before Schatz had arrived there and the patent never resulted in any royalties. The disagreement could not be resolved, and Schatz was fired.

He applied for several jobs in research labs and was sometimes accepted by more than one at a time, but as he was deciding which position to take, inexplicably the “
offer was gone
,” as Vivian recalled. Schatz saw
the hand of Waksman in these sudden withdrawals, but there is no documentation to support that charge. It seems more likely that it can be attributed to his post-lawsuit reputation as a troublemaker. “So all I did was ‘
intellectualize
about [my ideas],' he told a colleague. “The research went on in my head ... The positions I did get were ‘survival positions.'”

The thrust of his work was often against the establishment; that was his nature. As an early green movement activist, he
challenged the fertilizer companies
to end their dominant funding of soil research, which had led to decreasing attention being paid to natural, organic fertilizers. An article of his on the subject was published in a 1966 issue of
Compost Science,
an organic-farming periodical. He wanted to pursue this attack further, but could not find sufficient funding.

With Uncle Joe, he set up a small publishing company to publish their research on the chelation theory of dental caries and their opposition to fluoridation as a means of fighting tooth decay. Earlier, Schatz had joined the husband of his sister, Elaine, in running a
celery farm
in New Jersey, but they could not compete with the low price of the California product.

Whenever an opportunity to set the streptomycin record straight presented itself—a new version of Waksman's story in the newspapers or magazines or in a scientific journal, or a new book with related material—Schatz would fire off a letter to the editor, or a colleague, under his Dr. J. J. Martin (Uncle Joe) nom de plume. Two such opportunities arose in 1955.

Albert Schatz with Uncle Joe at the National Agricultural College in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. (Courtesy of Vivian Schatz
)

As “Dr. J. J. Martin,” he wrote to
William Wightman, a lecturer in the history
and philosophy of science at the University of Aberdeen, who had just published
The Growth of Scientific Ideas
. Schatz enclosed details of his discovery of streptomycin—and how the story had been wrongly told.

Thanking “Dr. Martin” for his documentation, Wightman replied, “It is as well for historians to know that neither International Adjudicating Bodies, nor men of science themselves are proof against acts of folly and corruption.” The Nobel judges had committed “
a double act of folly
” in his view, ignoring the codiscoverer and the patent documentation showing what Schatz had done.

But Wightman also did not approve of the Nobel Prize being awarded to
anyone
for the discovery of streptomycin—“a discovery, which, though important in relation to a particular problem of therapy, involved no new scientific principle; being in fact only an extension of the principle first established in the case of penicillin, to which a prize had already been awarded.”

Schatz sent another letter under Uncle Joe's name to the Cambridge University professor of animal pathology, W. I. B. Beveridge, who had just published a much acclaimed book on scientific research,
The Art of Scientific Investigation: An Entirely Fresh Approach to the Intellectual Adventure of Scientific Research
. In a review of Beveridge's book, the
New York Times
said that “many of the author's statements deserve to be quoted in every treatise on the psychology and practice of research.”

Beveridge replied to “Dr. Martin” that the misallocation of merit in the Schatz case, as “Dr. Martin” had outlined it to him, was “as you say a particularly bad case, but one knows of other such incidents.” It showed only, he said, that “some scientists are
no better in these matters
than other people.”

In his book, in a section headed “The Ethics of Research,” Beveridge had addressed the question of whose name came first on scientific papers. “Another improper practice which unfortunately is not as rare as one might expect, is for a director of research to annex most of the credit for work which he has only supervised by publishing it under joint authorship with his name first.” The aim, he wrote, should be to avoid overlooking the junior person as “merely one of ‘and
collaborators
.'”

Waksman could not be accused of this scientific sin in the Schatz case. He had put Schatz's name first on the two key papers on streptomycin, but when he was challenged later by Schatz, this apparently generous and well-deserved act had in fact no real meaning in Waksman's mind.

Schatz seemed to derive some comfort from continuing to seek justice, as he saw it, through this kind of correspondence. But no one in America, popular journalists or scientists, asked him for his story. Schatz decided to leave the country.

IN 1960, VIVIAN
started a Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania, and Albert became the bacteriologist at Philadelphia General Hospital. It was a good job, and he had a parking place with his name on it. One day in 1962, he met a visiting professor from the University of Chile, in Santiago, who was looking for an American to help his university organize its science faculties. So Albert, Vivian, and their two daughters moved to Santiago. Vivian became director of the new American School in the Chilean capital of Santiago. It was one of the happiest times of their lives, an opportunity to forget the disappointment of streptomycin.

They stayed in Chile for three years. It was a time of political upheaval, with increasing popular support for Salvador Allende, Chile's future socialist president. “We had Chilean friends who were socialists, and we
had to keep that quiet
at embassy gatherings,” Vivian recalled. But even in their self-imposed exile, it turned out, they could not escape streptomycin and Dr. Waksman.

One day, William Feldman of the Mayo Clinic turned up in Santiago on a tour of South America. After contracting tuberculosis from his experiments, he had suffered through a long period of rehabilitation. Now he had recovered and was enjoying his South American tour. He and Schatz met at the university and chatted about old times. Feldman was surprised to learn that Schatz had been the one who had supplied him his first samples of streptomycin; Dr. Waksman had never mentioned it. And Feldman told Schatz that he had refused to take the money from the royalties that Waksman had allocated to him. It had been a matter of principle not to take rewards from his research, he said.

In the small scientific community that existed in Santiago at the time, the story of Schatz's part in the discovery of streptomycin became widely
known. In 1964, he was honored by Chilean doctors and invited to give a speech about his discovery to the medical community, including the Chilean ministers of health and education. It was the first time since his lawsuit that he had been invited to talk about streptomycin to a professional body—and the first time he had described the discovery since his 1946 paper to the New York State Association of Public Health.

Schatz used the occasion to launch a
blistering attack
on Waksman, in all but name. During the past two decades, he said, the story of the discovery of streptomycin had been “enshrouded in an aura of fantasy.” Certain “supposed events” had never really occurred, or, at least, “not in the way that has been claimed. Some minor things which did happen, have become exaggerated out of all proportion to their significance. Other really important information has been completely overlooked, distorted, or concealed.”

There was a myth, he said, that the discovery of streptomycin had depended, somehow, on the earlier discovery of streptothricin, that it had “pointed the way.” In reality, the “research which resulted in the discovery of streptomycin” had been a “logical extrapolation” of the earlier Russian work on antagonistic microbes. “When I began the search for an antibiotic agent effective against tuberculosis, it was the findings of the Soviet investigators, not streptothricin, which gave me confidence that such a substance could be found.”

The search for antibiotics at Rutgers had been described as a systematic research when in reality it had been “nothing of the sort,” Schatz said. It had involved the “most routine techniques for isolating and testing cultures.” There had been no rational basis for choosing one organism over another or for choosing the media in which the cultures had been grown, he said. “No one knows in advance which organism will produce a new and useful antibiotic.” The “background information” on actinomycetes in the Rutgers laboratory had not been helpful in knowing which ones to pick. Finally, he said, it had also been a “remarkable coincidence” that the antibiotic he had isolated was effective against Gram-negative organisms, and also the Gram-positive tuberculosis germ.

The attack on Waksman might have gone nowhere if Uncle Joe had not, once again, intervened. He suggested that Schatz send a copy of his lecture to one of his publishing outlets (for his dental caries articles) in Pakistan.

So, two decades after he had isolated
S. griseus
, after many articles by and about Waksman in newspapers, magazines, and scientific journals,
after fictional accounts from the Rutgers PR machine, after the lawsuit and the Nobel Prize, Schatz's own account was published not in a journal of microbiology or medicine in America, or even Europe, but in the
Pakistan Dental Review
, in Lahore. If Waksman saw a copy, he never mentioned it. And it received no attention in the American or European media.

In 1965, Schatz and his family returned to America at the end of his contract, and Schatz accepted a job at Washington University in St. Louis, teaching science education. But in Missouri, as elsewhere, Schatz could not escape Waksman's shadow. Before he could start teaching, the university required Schatz to have a test for tuberculosis. The test was positive. It didn't mean that the disease would develop, and he had no idea where he had picked up the germ, but it was a stark reminder of his streptomycin work in the basement laboratory. He would always wonder whether it was there that he had picked up the germ.

It was also the year when the patent on streptomycin expired, and another opportunity for the Rutgers PR Department to praise Waksman for his discovery. The
Passaic Herald-News
, faithful to its local hero, reminded its readers that they should also consider the forgotten “co-discoverer.” Under the headline “Great Boon, Sad Story,” the paper said that it was “
unfortunate
” that Rutgers “saw fit only to mention” Dr. Waksman.

To celebrate the twenty years of the streptomycin patent and twenty-five years of antibiotics from his lab, Waksman himself wrote an
eight-page article
titled “A Quarter Century of the Antibiotic Era,” for the American Society for Microbiology. In describing
his
discovery, Waksman acknowledged the help of experts from Merck, Pfizer, and Squibb, but Schatz's name did not appear, not even in the referenced scientific papers.