Wednesday, June 13, 2012

The true discoverer of streptomycin is discovered

Dr. Selman Waksman won the 1952 Nobel Prize for the discovery of streptomycin, the first effective TB therapy. However, he might not have actually discovered the drug. Long lost to history, his student at Rutgers, Albert Schatz probably deserved most, if not all of the credit.

Peter Pringle, in a recent NY Times article and his new book, Experiment Eleven, describes the efforts Waksman made to claim the discovery for himself and discredit Schatz.  The mystery is solved when he discovered a small unopened box in the Rutgers University archives that contained the Schatz's lab notebooks...and the truth. It will be interesting to see if the Nobel Assembly awards a medal posthumously to Dr. Schatz, who died in 2005.

image credit: NYTimes
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