The Off-Key Bard
History

This Day in History — The Discovery of Streptomycin

On this day in 1943

On October 19, 1943, Rutgers graduate student Albert Schatz found the soil microbe behind streptomycin, the first antibiotic effective against tuberculosis.

The Off-Key Bard enters a basement laboratory at Rutgers University in New Jersey in 1943. World War II dominates the headlines, scientists are racing to develop new medicines, and a young graduate student spends his days examining bacteria collected from soil and other unlikely places. The work is tedious. Petri dishes fill the benches. Cultures must be grown, examined, and tested against dangerous microorganisms. But hidden among those samples is something extraordinary.

"What if the answer to one of humanity's deadliest diseases has been beneath our feet all along?"

On October 19, 1943, Albert Schatz, a 23-year-old graduate student working in the laboratory of the soil microbiologist Selman Waksman at Rutgers, noticed that an extract from a soil microorganism was killing tuberculosis bacteria. The microbe would yield streptomycin, the first antibiotic effective against tuberculosis. The discovery transformed the treatment of infectious disease and helped establish a new way of finding medicines: systematically searching the microbes of the natural world for compounds that kill harmful bacteria. It would also become one of the most bitter disputes over scientific credit in the history of medicine.

A Disease Without a Cure

To understand why streptomycin mattered, we have to return to a time when tuberculosis was among the most feared diseases in the world. Known historically as consumption, it is caused by the bacterium Mycobacterium tuberculosis, which usually attacks the lungs. It spreads through the air when someone with active disease coughs, speaks, or sings. Crowded housing, poverty, poor ventilation, and limited medical care helped it spread, and entire families could be devastated as the illness gradually weakened its victims.

For most of history, physicians had no reliable medicine that could eliminate the bacteria. Treatment focused on rest, nutrition, fresh air, and supportive care, and patients were often sent to sanatoriums, usually in rural or mountainous places, in the hope that favorable conditions would help the body control the infection. Some recovered. Others stayed ill for years. Many died. Surgeons also tried procedures intended to collapse or rest part of an infected lung, which sometimes helped but carried risks and could not reliably cure the disease.

By the early 1940s, antibiotics had begun to change medicine. Penicillin, discovered by Alexander Fleming in 1928 and developed into a practical treatment through the later work of Howard Florey, Ernst Chain, Norman Heatley, and others, had shown that microorganisms could make substances that kill disease-causing bacteria. During World War II it became increasingly important for treating wounded soldiers. But penicillin acts mainly against Gram-positive bacteria, and it offered no answer to tuberculosis. Physicians still needed a drug that could attack the tuberculosis bacterium itself.

Mining the Soil

That challenge attracted Selman Waksman. Born in 1888 near Kiev, he emigrated to the United States in 1910 and entered Rutgers College the next year. He went on to build his career there as a specialist in the microorganisms of the soil. To most people, soil is minerals, moisture, and decaying matter. To a microbiologist it is an extraordinarily complex ecosystem, with enormous populations of bacteria, fungi, and other organisms competing for nutrients and space. Some have evolved chemical weapons to suppress their rivals, and Waksman reasoned that those natural chemical interactions could be a source of useful medicines.

Where Fleming's penicillin had begun with a lucky observation, Waksman's approach was organized. His team collected soil microbes, grew them in culture, looked for zones where bacterial growth was inhibited, and then tested promising organisms against disease-causing bacteria. Waksman is also credited with suggesting the word "antibiotic" for such substances.

The method produced early results, and early disappointments. Actinomycin, found in 1940, was active against many bacteria but too toxic for therapeutic use. Streptothricin, isolated two years later, seemed safe in animals until further study revealed a delayed toxic effect. The lesson was important: a useful antibiotic must harm the infecting organism without causing unacceptable damage to the patient.

October 19, 1943

Among the researchers on the problem was Albert Schatz, born in Norwich, Connecticut, in 1920. He had been conscripted into the military in December 1942 and was discharged in June 1943 with a back injury, after which he returned to Waksman's laboratory. There he began examining actinomycetes, soil microbes that grow in branching, filament-like structures that resemble fungi, though they are classified as bacteria. Many produce complex chemical compounds in their struggles with other microorganisms.

The work demanded persistence. Cultures had to be maintained, extracts prepared and tested, and the results checked to see whether the inhibition was real and reproducible. In about three and a half months, Schatz identified two related strains of Streptomyces griseus. One came from a throat swab of a healthy chicken, the other from heavily manured field soil. Schatz later recalled that on the afternoon of October 19, 1943, at about 2 p.m., he realized he had a new antibiotic.

The new substance was named streptomycin, after its source. Unlike earlier compounds, it showed promise of combining strong antibacterial activity with enough tolerability to be useful in medicine, and it was active against both Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria. Further testing would be needed to establish its effectiveness and safety.

The discovery was reported in a paper published in January 1944, listing Schatz, Elizabeth Bugie, and Waksman as authors. Bugie, another Rutgers graduate student, was a co-author of the paper, and an account of her life describes her as an overlooked contributor to the work.

From Petri Dish to Patient

An antibiotic that works in a culture must still prove itself in a living body. Waksman enlisted researchers at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, William Feldman and H. Corwin Hinshaw, who began animal tests in 1944. In a large trial, they treated 25 tuberculosis-infected guinea pigs and compared them with 24 untreated controls, reporting the results in December 1944. The drug was supplied by Merck, whose head, George Merck, agreed to the plan as part of the war effort. Merck had also partly funded Waksman's research, in exchange for the rights to any patents arising from it, which were later reassigned to Rutgers.

In November 1944, a patient named Patricia Thomas began treatment at Mayo, and the clinic describes her as the first person to receive a full schedule of streptomycin for the disease. Part of her infected lung was removed in April 1945, and she was left clear of tuberculosis. Further trials confirmed the results. For the first time, doctors had an antibiotic that could directly attack the bacterium responsible for tuberculosis, and patients who had faced years of illness with few options could receive a medicine that targeted the infection itself.

Streptomycin belongs to a class of drugs called aminoglycosides. It works by entering bacterial cells and binding to the 30S subunit of the ribosome, the molecular machine that assembles proteins from genetic instructions. The binding makes the ribosome misread those instructions, so the cell produces faulty proteins and may die.

A Flawed Miracle

Streptomycin was not a perfect medicine. It could injure the organ of balance in the ear and cause hearing loss, sometimes temporarily and sometimes permanently, depending on the dose and the length of treatment. Another problem soon followed. Reports of resistant bacteria appeared as early as 1946, and patients treated with streptomycin alone could improve and then relapse as resistant organisms took over. It was an early demonstration of a problem that still challenges medicine. Antibiotics exert selective pressure, killing susceptible bacteria and leaving resistant ones to multiply.

The answer was combination therapy. The Veterans Administration began combining streptomycin with para-aminosalicylic acid (PAS) in 1949, and later drugs such as isoniazid helped establish treating tuberculosis with several medicines at once as the foundation of modern care. Streptomycin itself is now largely a second-line drug, because of resistance and toxicity, but the principles learned during its introduction remain foundational.

It also changed pharmaceutical research. Waksman's laboratory had demonstrated that systematic screening of soil microbes could lead to valuable medicines, and over the following decades researchers found many more antibiotics in microorganisms. Soil became one of the richest sources of antimicrobial compounds ever investigated.

Who Gets the Credit?

While the scientific impact was becoming clear, a different struggle was developing. For years, public recognition centered on Waksman, the senior scientist who directed the laboratory and whose research program had made the discovery possible. Schatz believed his own role, personally isolating the organisms and carrying out the crucial experiments, was being minimized, and the dispute involved both credit and royalties.

In March 1950, Schatz sued Waksman and the Rutgers Research and Endowment Foundation. The case raised hard questions about the relationship between graduate students and their supervisors and how credit should be assigned in collaborative research. It was settled out of court. Under the settlement, Schatz was recognized as a co-discoverer, and he received $120,000 in foreign patent rights and 3 percent of the royalties. According to a biography of Bugie, she received a far smaller share, 0.2 percent, and was not named on the patent.

In 1952, Waksman alone received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for his discovery of streptomycin, the first antibiotic effective against tuberculosis." Schatz was not included. Some observers have argued that Feldman and Hinshaw, who showed the drug worked against tuberculosis, deserved a share as well. Supporters of Waksman stress the research program and methods he built, and supporters of Schatz stress that he carried out the decisive work. Rutgers awarded Schatz its University Medal in 1994 and later turned his basement laboratory into a museum.

The controversy is a reminder that science is a collaborative effort, even when awards and public attention settle on one person. A breakthrough may depend on a professor's program, a student's experiments, another researcher's tests, a physician's clinical studies, and the industrial effort to make enough of the drug. Streptomycin required all of them.

The disease itself was not eliminated. Tuberculosis remains a major global health problem, particularly where poverty, limited access to care, HIV infection, and drug-resistant strains complicate prevention and treatment. But the world of tuberculosis treatment after streptomycin was fundamentally different from the one before it. Physicians had moved from supportive care and invasive interventions toward directly attacking the microorganism responsible. And the source of that transformation was astonishingly ordinary: soil, a material people walk across every day, a living ecosystem of organisms competing, adapting, and producing chemicals to survive.

"Beneath the soil, unseen and small,
A hidden answer challenged all.
From humble earth, a medicine grew—
And gave the sick a chance anew."

The discovery of streptomycin shows how powerful scientific progress can be when it comes from careful investigation of the natural world. It also reminds us that a discovery is rarely a single isolated moment. Waksman's program created the conditions for systematic antibiotic screening. Schatz performed the crucial experimental work that identified the new antibiotic. Clinical researchers demonstrated its medical value. And its legacy includes difficult lessons about antibiotic resistance, drug safety, and the importance of properly recognizing the people responsible for scientific discoveries.

On October 19, 1943, Albert Schatz found the antibiotic activity that led to streptomycin in Selman Waksman's laboratory at Rutgers University. Developed through the work of Schatz, Elizabeth Bugie, Waksman, and the clinical researchers who followed, the discovery produced the first antibiotic effective against tuberculosis, and it helped make soil microbiology one of medicine's most important sources of life-saving drugs.

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