Word: waksman
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Waksman's slow, unspectacular search for new antibiotics still goes on. In the past ten years he and his associates at the New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station at Rutgers University, New Brunswick have examined more than 100,000 cultures of organisms found in the soil of nearby farms...
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...
Last week Scientist Waksman (Ph.D. University of California) announced a new, promising, greyish-colored antibiotic which he called neomycin. Like streptomycin, it is derived from actinomycetes. a group of tiny organisms that are in a twilight evolutionary zone between molds and bacteria. The first preliminary tests made since it was developed last summer look good; it may, eventually, prove better than streptomycin. Dr. Waksman and Hubert A. Lechevalier, a graduate student who worked with him, reported their discovery in Science...
...only a slight harmful effect, or none at all, on laboratory animals. Like penicillin, neomycin may possibly work when taken by mouth. Streptomycin must be injected. But headline writers who shout that neomycin is already a better drug for tuberculosis than streptomycin get a pained look from Dr. Waksman. He does not know yet when tests on human patients can get started...
...Selman A. Waksman, 60, Russian-born Rutgers University biologist, discoverer of streptomycin, and Dr. Rene J. Dubos, 47, French-born Rockefeller Institute biologist, honored jointly for their pioneer work in antibiotics...