Word: microbiologist
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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When Rutgers University needed to save some money during the war winter of 1941-42, a budget official had a bright idea: Why not fire Selman Waksman, an obscure Ukrainian-born microbiologist who was getting $4,620 a year for "playing around with microbes in the soil?" That sort of fun & games, the moneyman pointed out, had never really paid...
People are always asking greying Microbiologist Selman Abraham Waksman, 60, how he discovered the wonder drug streptomycin in 1943. Modest Dr. Waksman (rhymes with phlox-man) has a stock answer which makes it sound pretty simple. He merely examined about 10,000 cultures, he explains. Only 1,000 would kill bacteria in preliminary tests; only 100 looked promising in later tests; only ten were isolated and described; one of the ten proved to be streptomycin. It just happened that streptomycin was the first effective drug that doctors had ever found to fight tuberculosis...
Grisein. The $5,000 Passano Foundation Award (kicked in by Williams & Wilkins of Baltimore, medical publishers) went to Russian-born Dr. Selman Abraham 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...
...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, in last week's Journal of the American Medical Association added up the results in 1,000 cases. Highlight...
Suspecting that it was not the parasites themselves which attacked the giant cells, but an unidentified chemical which they secreted. Dr. Roskin called in his wife. A Moscow University microbiologist named Nina Klyueva, she developed a solution from inactivated trypanosomes -KR for the two doctors' initials. Tests proved that the KR solution cured cancer implanted in mice, but did not harm healthy mice. To make sure that it had no ill effects on human beings, Dr. Roskin injected himself with the solution...