Free Experiment Eleven by Peter Pringle

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 crushedby 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.
    â€œHow 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.

15 • Choose a Lawyer
    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