2 Dirty Business
T
he 1952 Nobel Prize in Medicine went to Selman Waksman for the discovery of streptomycin, the first antibiotic effective against tuberculosis. However, streptomycin was actually discovered by Albert Schatz, a graduate student working largely independently in Waksman’s laboratory. How did this happen? Selman Waksman was born in the Ukraine region in czarist Russia and immigrated to America in 1910, obtaining his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in agriculture at Rutgers University in New Jersey. He discovered the role of microbes in degrading plant matter in the formation of soil, and he clarified the influences of nitrogen, minerals, and temperature on the quality of soil.1 Waksman’s careful work to elucidate the factors that make dirt good for growing contributed hugely to the next hundred years of soil-conservation efforts around the world. Waksman had developed a systematic six-step technique for isolating pure strains of microbes from soil. He studied how some bacteria inhibit the growth of other microbes in nature’s ongoing “survival of the strongest” contest for microscopic territory in dirt. Solving the composition of dirt for all mankind is a pretty big deal, but—let’s face 1
S. A. Waksman and J. P. Martin, “The Role of Microorganisms in the Conservation of the Soil” Science 90, no. 2335 (1939): 304–5.
