Experiment Eleven (20 page)

The streptomycin field was even more crowded. At the Mayo Clinic, Feldman and Hinshaw had shown the drug's effectiveness with their crucial guinea pig tests. Company chemists at Merck had worked on the extraction, purification, and chemical structure of streptomycin. And now, seven years later, Albert Schatz was pressing his claim to being the Fleming of streptomycin. Half a dozen people besides Waksman were possible prizewinners. The committee could decide that was too many and look elsewhere.

Waksman decided to fight and hope that the young Schatz would give in and settle the case out of court. Surely Schatz's claims would be crushed
by the weight of Waksman's rank, his academic achievement, his honors and his awards, and by the superior firepower of his friends and colleagues, of Merck and its teams of lawyers, of the Rutgers PR Department. His former apprentice would be forced to retreat.

ELEVEN DAYS AFTER
his first letter, Waksman wrote to Schatz again. Six pages long, this second letter laid out his counterattack. It was based on Waksman's parable of the chicken—now specifically labeling Schatz as a tool,
a mere pair of hands
. It was he, Waksman, who had identified the two streptomycin-producing cultures as
A. griseus
, a microbe that he had first isolated twenty-eight years earlier. One of these cultures had come from Doris Jones, the other had been found by Schatz. It was he, Waksman, who had ordered a detailed investigation of the two cultures, and his assistants Elizabeth Bugie and Christine Reilly had helped in those experiments. Thus, Schatz was “one of many cogs in a great wheel” and had played no part in later investigations.

“How dare you now present yourself as so innocent of what has transpired when you know full well that you had nothing to do with the practical development of streptomycin and were not entitled to any special consideration,” he wrote. He “emphatically” denied that Schatz had any special rights to streptomycin, or that he had ever “suggested or believed” that he had any such rights, “or that you ever thought or mentioned to me that you had such rights.”

Finally Waksman exploded, “What do you know of the headaches, of the sleepless nights, of the energy, spent to put the antibiotic across?”

If Schatz had attached any significance to the fact that Waksman had put
Schatz's name
first on the two key papers announcing streptomycin, then he was being naive, Waksman implied. In most other universities, he wrote, Schatz's name “would have probably been mentioned in a footnote, or at the end of the paper ... I was proud of your abilities and attainments ... In your case I was as generous as any professor could be expected to be.”

As to Schatz's name on the patent, Waksman wrote that it was only there to show that Schatz had helped in the discovery. The Merck lawyer had “insisted” that Schatz's name be left out and that only his name be used. But he had “preferred” Schatz's name be included.

EXPECTING a lawsuit, Waksman launched a
furious and sometimes wacky campaign to belittle Schatz's contribution to the discovery. He would seek evidence that Schatz was unstable and, worse, that as a laboratory researcher on streptomycin he might have doctored his notebooks to give himself greater credit than he was due. Waksman's preparation of his defense took on an air of desperation, hardly befitting a university professor and certainly not in the amiable, fatherly image that Waksman had created for his apprentices.

In the vicious confrontation that followed, rank clearly mattered, but so did class. Schatz and his family came from a different social stratum than Waksman, the kind of class distinction that was well drawn in the Russia they had left behind, and that still permeated their lives in the New World. Compared with Waksman, Schatz's father was not a success. He was an itinerant housepainter and a dirt farmer scraping a living in the depleted soils of Connecticut, and Schatz's mother had been a bakery shop assistant who had never been to high school. They were not like the educated and well-read family of Fradia London Waksman, the proud matriarch of Novaya Priluka, and her husband, Jacob Waksman, the owner of property in nearby Vinnitsa.

In preparing his counterattack in the spring of 1949, Waksman relied on the expert advice of Russell Watson, the sharp-witted lawyer for the Rutgers Foundation, and the media-savvy spin doctors of the Rutgers PR Department, always eager to defend their famous faculty member.

Watson's first concern was the question of the royalty payments. To lessen the impact, Waksman immediately volunteered to take a pay cut, slicing his royalty check in half, from 20 to 10 percent of whatever Rutgers received. In order to portray Waksman as a giver rather than a taker, the PR Department announced plans, which had been brewing for some months, for a new Institute of Microbiology to be built at Rutgers. According to the PR Department, it would be funded with a “gift” from Waksman of a million dollars. But this was a PR stunt. Waksman had not earned a million dollars in royalties from streptomycin to give away, and he had assigned the patent to the Rutgers Foundation; the rest of the royalty earnings belonged to Rutgers, not him.

At the same time, Watson and Waksman launched a series of bizarre attempts to discredit Schatz, and made a crude bid to buy his silence. In the years to come, Waksman would wonder how he could have avoided the unpleasantness that was about to be unleashed. For now, he was determined to protect his reputation, and his fortune, at all costs.

At Watson's request, Waksman drafted a memo outlining why he, and not “Mr. Schatz,” should get the credit for the discovery of streptomycin. (He deliberately did not grant him the Ph.D. honorific of “Dr.”) The memo repeated much of what he had laid out in his letter to Schatz. He had been the director of the research lab. He had always given his graduate students—of whom Schatz had been only one—directions as to how to proceed once an organism had been isolated. They were his tools, he stressed, not yet fellow scientists.

To reinforce his claim, Waksman now added a list of the occurrences when streptomycin was announced immediately after the discovery—“
without the name of Schatz
.” These included a public announcement from his lecture in New York on November 16, 1944, when he discussed the great possibilities of streptomycin; his first radio address on streptomycin, given in 1944; the first broad summary of streptomycin, published in 1945; and the radio address telling the story of streptomycin, “where you find outlined the emphatic points.” The name of Albert Schatz did not appear in connection with any of these special events, he triumphantly declared in the memo to Watson. Then he attached “Mr. Schatz's PhD thesis,” which, he noted sarcastically, “must be read in the light of the general policy under which the graduate students submitting theses from our department
are permitted to use data obtained by other students.” In other words, Albert Schatz's thesis was not all his own work.

WAKSMAN THEN SOUGHT
the support of former students who had worked for him during the discovery of streptomycin. On March 14, Waksman held a conference of four former graduates in his office. Among those present were Elizabeth Bugie and Christine Reilly, who had worked in the upstairs lab in 1943 when Schatz was in the basement. The meeting was written up by Sam Epstein, the author of the 1946 Rutgers-sponsored book on streptomycin,
Miracles from Microbes
, and who was now a paid consultant to Waksman's legal team. According to Epstein's account of the meeting, all four former graduates agreed that

Schatz made no unique contribution to streptomycin because (1) he was, like other members of the staff, carrying out Dr. Waksman's directions; (2) doing no independent work; (3) the part done by Schatz could have been done by any of the other workers, had they been assigned to his task—as he could have done their work. In other words, the various assignments presented no special problems involving special skill or knowledge. Reilly and Bugie also agreed that Schatz had had closer contact with Waksman than other members of the staff, Bugie claiming Schatz's (four times a day) trips up to Dr. Waksman's office from the basement laboratory becoming something of a joke among members of the department.

Next, Waksman asked Schatz's former employers about his “personality” and work habits. Waksman already knew that Schatz had had difficulty in those first years trying to find the right work for himself, because Schatz had written him several times. Those early misfits—the way Schatz and his job had not matched and his tendency to be a loner—could be very useful to Waksman now in portraying Schatz as somewhat unbalanced and even unreliable.

He asked Dr. Chester Stock, head of the chemotherapy research division at Sloan-Kettering, for “a confidential opinion of Dr. Schatz's personality, especially his relations with the other workers both in your
group and the other divisions of the Institute during his stay at Sloan-Kettering.”

Without mentioning his confrontation with Schatz, he wrote, “Certain matters have come up recently which have made me quite suspicious of some of his activities, both here and in the other laboratories where he has been since he left us in 1946.”

Waksman said he was “trying to collect, therefore, information concerning his associations with workers in other Institutions.” He asked Dr. Stock for “as frank an expression as you can concerning him, his work and other matters that may have a bearing upon his personality and his ability to get along with other people. All this information will be kept
highly confidential
.”

But Waksman had no intention of keeping the information he gleaned confidential. He was preparing to use it in court.

Dr. Stock was ready, even eager, to oblige. By return mail, he wrote that if Schatz had not left to go to C. B. van Niel's, “we would have found it necessary to
request him to leave
,” but he did not explain why.

Stock admitted that he had allowed Schatz to spend from “one fourth to one third of his time on research of his own choosing.” But that meant Schatz “worked upon everything but the problem he came here to do ... He processed [
sic
] with the requested studies in an indifferent fashion and allowed himself to be easily stopped by the problems encountered. Some of the problems are not easily handled, if at all, but Dr. Schatz failed to show initiative and enthusiasm in trying to overcome the difficulties. I believe it was due to his great interest in his other studies.”

Yet Waksman already knew that Schatz had felt underemployed at Sloan-Kettering, mostly because the labs had not been ready. Out of boredom, he had taken Russian lessons at Columbia. They had discussed this in letters, and indeed, Waksman had advised him to leave and go to California and van Niel.

As to Schatz's personality, Dr. Stock said that Schatz totally lacked a “team spirit.” In seminars and other discussions his questions and comments were seldom “made in a friendly spirit.” His attitude at times might well be summarized as “anti-social,” and he had “rapid changes of interest.” This was “possibly” merely an indication of a keen, active mind, “but I have wondered if it might not be indicative of a certain instability which is also reflected in his somewhat anti-social attitude and actions.”

Waksman also contacted Gilbert Dalldorf, the director of the Department of Health in Albany and Schatz's first employer after Rutgers. Dalldorf wrote, “I personally was
very fond of
Dr. Schatz and was disappointed that he left. He was interested in opportunities for advanced study.” However, he added that “it was only after he left that I learned that he had been malicious toward one of the members of staff in a rather irresponsible manner. Perhaps this was an aberration that will never again repeat itself.” There was no further explanation.

FOR HIS AGE
and relative inexperience, Schatz, with the encouragement of his parents and the help of Uncle Joe, proved to be a surprisingly formidable adversary. His strength came from one main source: He knew that truth was on his side. He was not as concerned as Waksman by the prospect of a lawsuit; he had no money to lose. He took on his new mission with the same determination he had displayed when he faced the daunting task of finding the microbe that could kill TB.

His first move was to inform his former colleague Doris Jones. She was doing her Ph.D. at Berkeley, about a hundred miles up the coast from Albert and Vivian in Pacific Grove. Schatz sent her a note about his exchange of letters with Waksman, and she immediately reassured him of her total support. There were “
no skeletons
hidden in any of her closets concerning his part in the discovery of streptomycin,” she said. It was the work of Schatz and Schatz alone, toiling in the basement of the Soil Microbiology Department.

“At no time,” she wrote, “have I ever regarded myself as being in any way instrumental to your isolation of the two organisms ... If Dr. Waksman now claims I had as much to do with it as you or even Chris [Christine Reilly] or Betty [Bugie], he is entirely mistaken ... I don't know why all this to do over who did what at this late date, for you know as well as I the story behind the story.