Word: griseus
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Long Road. By 1915, when he graduated, Selman Waksman already had one toe on the threshold of a great discovery: he had found in the soil a microbe which he has since named Streptomyces griseus.* He had no reason to suspect that it was a life-saving drug. A year later he wrote his master's thesis on this and related microbes. He was on the road to streptomycin, but it would be almost 30 years before he reached the end of the road...
Scientists often reach worthwhile goals by setting off in the wrong direction. Dr. Alma J. Whiffen of the Upjohn Co. did just that, several years ago. She noticed that Streptomyces griseus, the mold that produces bacteria-killing streptomycin, also produces a substance that is deadly to fungi. She separated it from the "beers" (solution in which the mold had been growing), called it "actidione," and tried it on fungi that cause human diseases...
...Waksman, 59, microbiologist of Rutgers and the New Jersey Agricultural Station. Dr. Waksman is certainly a leading U.S.-authority on antibiotics. His best-known discovery (1945) was streptomycin, the antibiotic which has shown most promise in the fight against tuberculosis. Early this year he persuaded his favorite mold (Actinomyces griseus) to produce another antibiotic (TIME, Feb. 10). The new one, "grisein," teams up efficiently with streptomycin (in the test tube) to fight a variety of stubborn bacteria...
Streptomycin, an antibiotic containing a germ-killing soil organism called Actinomyces griseus, is especially effective against certain deadly "gram-negative" infections for which there was no known cure. It does the job in many a case where penicillin and the sulfa drugs fail. But it is expensive: about $16 a gram (average treatment: six to ten grams). Since the drug's discovery in 1944 by Rutgers' Microbiologist Selman A. Waksman, it has been tested against a wide variety of diseases by a National Research Council committee headed by Boston's Dr. Chester S. Keefer. Their report...
Smell of Earth. Last week came news of a new antibiotic that may be as great as penicillin. Called streptomycin, it is a product of the mold-like Actinomyces griseus, which helps to give newly turned earth its distinctive smell. The drug was discovered by stocky, energetic Selman A. Waksman, 56, Russian-born microbiologist at the New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station in New Brunswick, and dean of U.S. antibiotic researchers. (The first to use the word antibiotic for these new drugs, he was writing on the subject years before penicillin's rise...