Happy Accidents: Serendipity in Major Medical Breakthroughs in the Twentieth Century by Morton A. Meyers Read Free Book Online
Authors: Morton A. Meyers
Sulfanilamide.” The company tested neither the solvent nor the final product for toxicity. Within weeks, more than a hundred people died, most of them children. The company's president refused to take responsibility and came to be convicted only on a technicality: the fact that the word elixir means a medicine containing alcohol, and there was none in the product sold.
Massengill's chief chemist committed suicide. The incident outraged the public, and Congress, and on June 15, 1938, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed into law the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act, providing for safety tests on drugs before they could be marketed. This milestone legislation twenty years later spared the United States from the thalidomide tragedy.
6
Pay Dirt
One day in 1943 a New Jersey poultry farmer noticed that one of his chickens seemed to be wheezing. None of his other birds exhibited this symptom, but he was fearful that it might be the harbinger of an infectious disease that could afflict his entire flock. He rushed the chicken to a state laboratory for testing, which found that a clod of dirt with a bit of mold on its surface was stuck in the bird's throat. The lab's pathologist, knowing of the interests of Selman Waksman, the distinguished soil microbiologist at the New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station of Rutgers University in the city of New Brunswick, took a throat swab and sent it to him.
Waksman had established himself as the world authority in his science in 1927 with a 900-page textbook, Principles of Soil Microbiology, which gave the field the stature of a scientific discipline. He attracted dozens of graduate students to his department to work and study under him, helping to transform Rutgers from a small agricultural college into a world-class institution.
Soil microbiology—the study of its microscopic inhabitants—had been a passion of Waksman's for many years. A Russian Jew who had emigrated to the United States from the Ukraine in 1910 and earned a Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of California at Berkeley in 1918, he would later recall the “earthy” fragrance of his rich native dirt. He came to understand that the smell was not of the earth itself but rather of a group of harmless funguslike bacteria called actinomycetes. Waksman's aim was to find practical applications ofhis science, particularly in improving soil fertility and crop production, and he knew that the organic chemical content of soil was a crucial factor. He analyzed soil, humus, clay, loam, and sand for their microbes to see how they grew, how they multiplied, what nutrients they took in, and what waste products they exuded. Such microbes exist through a delicate ecological competition, some producing chemicals to kill others. But still unknown was their potential value to modern medicine.
Waksman missed several opportunities to make the great discovery earlier in his career, but his single-mindedness did not allow for, in Salvador Luria's phrase, “the chance observation falling on the receptive eye.” In 1975 Waksman recalled that he first brushed past an antibiotic as early as 1923 when he observed that “certain actinomycetes produce substances toxic to bacteria” since it can be noted at times that “around an actinomycetes colony upon a plate a zone is formed free from fungous and bacterial growth.” 1 In 1935 Chester Rhines, a graduate student of Waksman's, noticed that tubercle bacilli would not grow in the presence of a soil organism, but Waksman did not think that this lead was worth pursuing: “In the scientific climate of the time, the result did not suggest any practical application for treatment of tuberculosis.” 2 The same year, Waksman's friend Fred Beau-dette, the poultry pathologist at Rutgers, brought him an agar tube with a culture of tubercle bacilli killed by a contaminant fungus growing on top of them. Again, Waksman was not interested: “I was not moved to jump to the logical conclusion and
Massengill's chief chemist committed suicide. The incident outraged the public, and Congress, and on June 15, 1938, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed into law the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act, providing for safety tests on drugs before they could be marketed. This milestone legislation twenty years later spared the United States from the thalidomide tragedy.
6
Pay Dirt
One day in 1943 a New Jersey poultry farmer noticed that one of his chickens seemed to be wheezing. None of his other birds exhibited this symptom, but he was fearful that it might be the harbinger of an infectious disease that could afflict his entire flock. He rushed the chicken to a state laboratory for testing, which found that a clod of dirt with a bit of mold on its surface was stuck in the bird's throat. The lab's pathologist, knowing of the interests of Selman Waksman, the distinguished soil microbiologist at the New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station of Rutgers University in the city of New Brunswick, took a throat swab and sent it to him.
Waksman had established himself as the world authority in his science in 1927 with a 900-page textbook, Principles of Soil Microbiology, which gave the field the stature of a scientific discipline. He attracted dozens of graduate students to his department to work and study under him, helping to transform Rutgers from a small agricultural college into a world-class institution.
Soil microbiology—the study of its microscopic inhabitants—had been a passion of Waksman's for many years. A Russian Jew who had emigrated to the United States from the Ukraine in 1910 and earned a Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of California at Berkeley in 1918, he would later recall the “earthy” fragrance of his rich native dirt. He came to understand that the smell was not of the earth itself but rather of a group of harmless funguslike bacteria called actinomycetes. Waksman's aim was to find practical applications ofhis science, particularly in improving soil fertility and crop production, and he knew that the organic chemical content of soil was a crucial factor. He analyzed soil, humus, clay, loam, and sand for their microbes to see how they grew, how they multiplied, what nutrients they took in, and what waste products they exuded. Such microbes exist through a delicate ecological competition, some producing chemicals to kill others. But still unknown was their potential value to modern medicine.
Waksman missed several opportunities to make the great discovery earlier in his career, but his single-mindedness did not allow for, in Salvador Luria's phrase, “the chance observation falling on the receptive eye.” In 1975 Waksman recalled that he first brushed past an antibiotic as early as 1923 when he observed that “certain actinomycetes produce substances toxic to bacteria” since it can be noted at times that “around an actinomycetes colony upon a plate a zone is formed free from fungous and bacterial growth.” 1 In 1935 Chester Rhines, a graduate student of Waksman's, noticed that tubercle bacilli would not grow in the presence of a soil organism, but Waksman did not think that this lead was worth pursuing: “In the scientific climate of the time, the result did not suggest any practical application for treatment of tuberculosis.” 2 The same year, Waksman's friend Fred Beau-dette, the poultry pathologist at Rutgers, brought him an agar tube with a culture of tubercle bacilli killed by a contaminant fungus growing on top of them. Again, Waksman was not interested: “I was not moved to jump to the logical conclusion and
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