Happy Accidents: Serendipity in Major Medical Breakthroughs in the Twentieth Century by Morton A. Meyers Read Free Book Online Page A

direct my efforts accordingly…. My major interest at that time was the subject of organic matter decomposition and the interrelationships among soil micro-organisms responsible for this process.” 3
    Although Waksman knew that tubercle bacilli are rapidly destroyed in soil, his fixed paradigm of thinking simply kept him from carrying the problem to a practical conclusion. From that same year onward, Merck made grants to Waksman for research into antibiotics. In 1942 he was urged by his son, then a medical student, to isolate strains of actinomycetes active against human tubercle bacilli, but he replied that the time had not come yet. The general lack of interest in antibiotics at this time was no doubt discouraging, but it did notstop a former pupil of Waksman's, René Dubos, who was working at the Rockefeller Institute in New York.
    In 1939 Dubos, a tall Frenchman with a robust personality and piercing intelligence, isolated a crystalline antibiotic, tyrothricin, from a harmless soil organism. It proved active against a range of disease-causing bacteria but was too toxic for use in humans. Several years earlier, working with Oswald T. Avery at the Rockefeller Institute, he had found that pneumonia microbes could be killed by dissolution of their protective capsules by other microorganisms. With the success of the sulfa drugs, however, this line of research had been abandoned. Now Dubos tried to interest other researchers in tyrothricin's promising properties, but the response from most researchers was lukewarm. Waksman was the exception. Inspired by Dubos's achievements, he began a dedicated screening of microbes. Meanwhile, also in 1939 came news from the other side of the Atlantic that Florey and his team of researchers at Oxford University were feverishly pursuing the antibiotic properties not of a bacterium but of a mold.
    Over the next four years, Waksman's intensive research program involved isolating some ten thousand different microbes from soil and other natural materials, such as dung, and methodically screening them for their killing abilities. To cultivate them on various media and test their ability to inhibit the growth of pathogenic bacteria was a painstaking process. Waksman's main focus was on actinomycetes. 4
    Only about a thousand of the cultures had antibiotic properties, and only a hundred excreted the antibiotic to the growth medium. (Antibiotic potential is not enough. The microbe has to yield something like “penicillin juice.”) Of these, ten were studied in detail, and by 1942 Waksman had isolated two different antibiotics: actinomycin and streptothricin. 5 They turned out not to be clinically useful because they were too toxic. But he knew he was on the right trail.
    S OIL Y IELDS A B OUNTY
    Among Waksman's graduate students was twenty-three-year-old Albert Schatz. He had been discharged early from army service because of a back problem and sought to complete his Ph.D. at Rutgers. Waksmanregarded him as unusually bright—a “star” among his student researchers. For more than three months, Schatz analyzed soil samples from the multitudes collected until, on October 19, 1943, in the words of fellow student Doris Jones, “Al hit paydirt!” 6
    The throat swab taken from the wheezing chicken's throat had by now made its way to Schatz. It grew greenish gray colonies of an actinomycete on an agar plate. Because of their color they were called Streptomyces griseus. By a remarkable twist of fate, this same organism had been found by Waksman himself twenty-eight years earlier while he was working on his doctorate, but he had not pursued it.
    Tests quickly showed that the organism not only was active against staphylococci but, most exciting, also had dramatic killing effects on the gram-negatives, bacteria that cause a variety of diseases that had been unaffected by penicillin, such as typhoid, bacillary dysentery, bubonic plague, brucellosis, and tularemia. Clearly, the organism generated a