Word: soiling
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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...
...Every place that is favorable for the growth of micro-organisms (and most places are) is a churning battleground of small, fierce creatures. A pinch of moist soil weighing one gram, for instance, may contain more bacteria (up to 2 billion) than there are people on earth. Among the ordinary creatures prowl savage protozoa engulfing them one by one. There is an underworld, too, made up of submicroscopic viruses, hardly more than big molecules, which often invade the larger organisms and multiply explosively...
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...
Meanwhile, Selman married Deborah Mitnick, a girl from the old country who had come to join her brother in the U.S. Back at Rutgers in 1918 as a lecturer in soil microbiology, after getting his Ph.D. at the University of California, Waksman worked mostly on the soil problems of farmers. But he began asking himself a question which is still far from answered: What do microbes do to the soil, to each other, and ultimately...
Dust to Dust. Long before Waksman began his work on soil, scientists had noted that if a diseased body is buried, the point of burial does not become a plague spot. Instead, something in the soil destroys the germs. It was proved that micro-organisms were doing the police job. But how, exactly, did one microorganism destroy another? By eating it? Beating it to the feed trough? Chemical warfare...