Experiment Eleven (3 page)

Selman Waksman as he was about to leave Russia in 1910. (Special Collections and University Archives, Rutgers University Libraries
)

But his goal was college. He thought of becoming a doctor, and was accepted at Columbia University medical school. Another cousin, who was a dentist, offered to help with the fees, but Waksman did not want to be tied down by debt.

So he had to take what was available, and in those days the most accessible institutions were the land grant colleges. These were created by the Morrill Act of 1862, which gave states land grants to fund public agricultural and engineering colleges. One of the first such establishments was at Rutgers College, established originally as Queen's College in 1766 and still a small institution at the turn of the twentieth century.

Rutgers was only eight miles from Metuchen, and Waksman's farmer cousin suggested he should go and see Jacob Lipman, another Russian immigrant, who was then head of the Department of Bacteriology. By 1911, Lipman was an established figure in soil science, having made his reputation on studies of bacteria that make nitrogen available for crops.

Waksman was persuaded that a course in agriculture would satisfy his curiosity about the biochemistry of living organisms, plus he was awarded a full scholarship. Aged twenty-three, he found it hard, at first, to be among
much younger boys of seventeen, who teased him for his clumsy English and dislike of sports. He also found the level of teaching poor. In his sophomore year, his chemistry professor was “an
unimaginative bore
,” physics was “a
great disappointment
,” he found the courses on American and English literature uninteresting, and he disliked Shakespeare. The French teacher was enthusiastic, but he felt he already had enough knowledge of foreign languages. The only courses that earned his approval were zoology and botany.

At the end of his second year, he yearned for independence and moved into a room in an old house on the college farm, paying for his accommodation by working in the college greenhouse and helping out in the laboratory. He bought cracked eggs from the Poultry Department at eleven cents a dozen.

Another and more important reason for striking out on his own was the arrival in New York from Novaya Priluka of a young woman named Deborah Mitnick. The daughter of a prosperous grain merchant, she was the sister of Waksman's best friend, Peisi, back in Ukraine, and after finishing grade school she had come to stay with her cousins, braving the voyage from Riga on her own in the middle of winter. She was good looking, bright, and energetic. In America, she quickly joined Peisi in New York—he had come to America with Waksman, in 1910. She
worked in a sweatshop
, became a member of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, and took singing lessons. She was affectionately known as Bobili, Russian for young grandmother, a nickname given in the hope that she would reach a ripe old age. Waksman had been her tutor in Novaya Priluka, had always admired her, and planned to marry her.

In his studies, Waksman had at last found a subject that interested him: general bacteriology under Dr. Lipman. “I felt that I was
finally under the tutelage of a master
,” he wrote. Waksman was the only student majoring in soil microbiology. For his senior thesis he listed the different groups of microbes—bacteria and fungi—but he was fascinated by the actinomycetes. He dug trenches on the college farm and mapped the different horizons of the microbes he found in the soil. He took samples from each layer, suspended them in water, put the microbes on petri dishes of nutrient agar, let them grow for a week, and then counted the different colonies that had developed.

The actinomycetes, hardly noticed in America, had been known for more than forty years in Europe, having first been described by German
researchers as a microbe responsible for a disease in cattle known as “lumpy jaw,” literally lumps on the animal's cheek containing a growth of the microbe. Russian researchers had also published papers on the actinomycetes, and Waksman had a distinct advantage over his colleagues because he could read German and Russian. He cataloged the different species and played an important role in their early classification into five genera, depending on a microscopic examination of the degree of branching of the cells, whether they produced spores in chains or singly on stalks, and whether they could live with or without oxygen. Thus, as Waksman would write forty years later, began his interest “in a group of microbes to which I was later to devote much of my time and which were to remain for the rest of my life as my
major scientific interest
.”

He was elected to the scholastic fraternity Phi Beta Kappa, and on his graduation in 1915, Lipman offered him a job as a research assistant in soil microbiology and a stipend of fifty dollars a month, which in those days meant he could continue to live comfortably in his room in the farmhouse and study for his master's degree.

By the end of 1915, he had written
his first academic paper
on bacteria, actinomycetes, and fungi in the soil. He was twenty-seven. The paper was published in February 1916, the year he became an American citizen and the year he married Deborah “Bobili” Mitnick.

Selman Waksman married Deborah Mitnick, his childhood sweetheart, in 1916. (Special Collections and Archives, Rutgers University Libraries
)

“I had
sent my roots into the soil
in search of its microbiological population,” he later wrote. “I was now on my way. I knew now exactly what I wanted and how to get it. The rest was merely to follow a plan. California was to prove whether I was on the right track.”

The new couple moved to the University of California at Berkeley, where Waksman studied for two years for his doctorate on the enzymes produced by microbes, mostly the actinomycetes. During his last year he supplemented his income by working at Cutter Laboratories, a local commercial laboratory producing antitoxins and vaccines against bacterial infections. It was the start of a lifelong connection between his research as a microbiologist and industry.

IN THE SUMMER OF 1918, AS
World War One was drawing to a close, Waksman returned to Rutgers to take up a new position as the farm college “Microbiologist.” His somewhat mundane task was to continue the search for microorganisms that would produce more fertile soils, but he insisted on the rather grand title, with a capital
M
, as a mark of the importance he attached to the emerging science, and his own place in it.

The war had taken its toll, even on the quiet backwater of the New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station. There were no graduate students and no lab assistants in the Department of Soil Microbiology. Waksman found the laboratory benches covered with
dirty petri dishes
, and the cultures of fungi and actinomycetes he had put into the culture collection before leaving for California were either dead or in need of prolonged resuscitation.

The sorry state of the laboratories reflected the scarcity of funds. His mentor, Dr. Lipman, could offer him only one day a week and fifteen hundred dollars a year, less than he had been getting as a part-time bacteriologist in the Cutter Laboratories in California. Personally, he had no funds in reserve, and he was forced to look for another part-time job in industry to supplement his income. It did not present a problem.

Before the war, America had been dependent on Germany for supplies of chemicals, laboratory glassware, and even scientific literature, but was gradually severing these ties and establishing its own infrastructure of scientific research. Waksman was now a bacteriologist and a biochemist,
a good combination for employment amid the expansion of microbial research after the war. The brewery and food industries were studying yeasts and cheese-producing molds, public health officials were looking at new ways to use microbes in sewage disposal, and drug companies were beefing up their research into medicines to cure infections. In agriculture, researchers concentrated on identifying soil-enriching microbes to grow bigger and better crops.

This bustling activity was a natural progression of the work of the nineteenth-century European pioneers of bacteriology—Louis Pasteur, who first formulated the germ theory of disease, and the German bacteriologist Robert Koch, who discovered the TB microbe. On the eve of World War One, German researchers had found a new purpose for the dyes that had been used to identify bacterial cells under the microscope. In 1910, a young German chemist, Paul Ehrlich, and his Japanese assistant, Sahachiro Hata, found an arsenic-based dye that worked against the syphilis microbe. They named it salvarsan, and it became the first of the so-called magic bullets that would cure bacterial infections.

From among the many companies making offers, Waksman chose the Takamine Laboratory, in nearby Clifton, New Jersey, one of the more successful of the new companies producing antibacterial products, including salvarsan. Waksman's job was simple enough for a postgraduate biochemist—he had to test each batch of salvarsan for toxicity to human cells. He was paid good money for those days, forty-five hundred dollars a year, and the company was close enough to Rutgers for him to combine his work with a day a week at the college. The money even allowed him to move into Manhattan, where his wife, Bobili, could enjoy the music, theater, and culture missing in rural New Jersey.

Over the next two years, Waksman was exposed to much more than how to test a drug for toxicity. The Takamine Laboratory produced and marketed
adrenaline
, a natural product of animal adrenal glands. His experience “
suggested the possibility
” of finding other useful natural products—perhaps even among his favorite microbes, the actinomycetes.

Waksman was a rising star in microbiology at a time when researchers were focusing on a ghoulish question. What became of all the microbes that caused deadly diseases—typhoid, dysentery, cholera, diphtheria, pneumonia, bubonic plague, and tuberculosis—when a dead body was buried in
the earth? When scientists searched the nearby soil, they found few of these germs, and they concluded that either the microbes could not exist in the soil, because the environment didn't suit them, or they were consumed by predators larger than themselves, or, a far more intriguing possibility, they were destroyed by other microbes.

In London at the turn of the twentieth century, researchers found that the cholera bacterium,
Vibrio cholerae
, survived in clean, deep water but not in surface water containing microbes present in the air. Cholera bacteria disappeared quickly, in a matter of hours, in sewage sludge, and also in seawater.
E. coli
was rapidly crowded out in manure piles teeming with other species of microbes. On these microbe battlefields, researchers in Europe and Australia found actinomycetes to be active warriors, but Waksman was reluctant to become involved. He had no medical training and preferred to concentrate on microbes that were useful in agriculture.

When finances at Rutgers improved in the early 1920s, Waksman became a full-time assistant professor in his chosen pursuit—the microbiology of the soil. The condition of his labs was still pitiful, and he complained to Dr. Lipman. The division of soil chemistry had only two workers but had “three laboratories and three large closets,” and his division, soil microbiology, “had four workers and only one laboratory.” Recent alterations to the Administration Building had not included painting his walls, which “absolutely
demoralizes the assistants
and discourages the workers,” he wrote to Lipman.

In 1923, Waksman and his graduate assistant, Robert Starkey, saw actinomycetes producing clear zones when matched against other bacteria. “A
zone is found free
from fungus and bacterial growth,” their joint paper concluded, and “numerous” microbes, including bacteria, fungi, and actinomycetes, “bring about injurious or destructive effects upon themselves or upon other soil organisms.” But Waksman was interested only in the effects on the fertility of the soil. He did not link this strange activity to the possibility of curing human infectious diseases. “Unfortunately our own observations on the growth inhibiting effect of actinomycetes upon other microbes were
not pursued further
at that time,” he later wrote.