Free Experiment Eleven by Peter Pringle Page A

well-read family of Fradia London Waksman, the proud matriarch of Novaya Priluka, and her husband, Jacob Waksman, the owner of property in nearby Vinnitsa.
    In preparing his counterattack in the spring of 1949, Waksman relied on the expert advice of Russell Watson, the sharp-witted lawyer for the Rutgers Foundation, and the media-savvy spin doctors of the Rutgers PR Department, always eager to defend their famous faculty member.
    Watson’s first concern was the question of the royalty payments. To lessen the impact, Waksman immediately volunteered to take a pay cut, slicing his royalty check in half, from 20 to 10 percent of whatever Rutgers received. In order to portray Waksman as a giver rather than a taker, the PR Department announced plans, which had been brewing for some months, for a new Institute of Microbiology to be built at Rutgers. According to the PR Department, it would be funded with a “gift” from Waksman of a million dollars. But this was a PR stunt. Waksman had not earned a million dollars in royalties from streptomycin to give away, and he had assigned the patent to the Rutgers Foundation; the rest of the royalty earnings belonged to Rutgers, not him.
    At the same time, Watson and Waksman launched a series of bizarre attempts to discredit Schatz, and made a crude bid to buy his silence. In the years to come, Waksman would wonder how he could have avoided the unpleasantness that was about to be unleashed. For now, he was determined to protect his reputation, and his fortune, at all costs.
    At Watson’s request, Waksman drafted a memo outlining why he, and not “Mr. Schatz,” should get the credit for the discovery of streptomycin. (He deliberately did not grant him the Ph.D. honorific of “Dr.”) The memo repeated much of what he had laid out in his letter to Schatz. He had been the director of the research lab. He had always given his graduate students—of whom Schatz had been only one—directions as to how to proceed once an organism had been isolated. They were his tools, he stressed, not yet fellow scientists.
    To reinforce his claim, Waksman now added a list of the occurrences when streptomycin was announced immediately after the discovery—“ without the name of Schatz .” These included a public announcement from his lecture in New York on November 16, 1944, when he discussed the great possibilities of streptomycin; his first radio address on streptomycin, given in 1944; the first broad summary of streptomycin, published in 1945; and the radio address telling the story of streptomycin, “where you find outlined the emphatic points.” The name of Albert Schatz did not appear in connection with any of these special events, he triumphantly declared in the memo to Watson. Then he attached “Mr. Schatz’s PhD thesis,” which, he noted sarcastically, “must be read in the light of the general policy under which the graduate students submitting theses from our departmentare permitted to use data obtained by other students.” In other words, Albert Schatz’s thesis was not all his own work.
    WAKSMAN THEN SOUGHT the support of former students who had worked for him during the discovery of streptomycin. On March 14, Waksman held a conference of four former graduates in his office. Among those present were Elizabeth Bugie and Christine Reilly, who had worked in the upstairs lab in 1943 when Schatz was in the basement. The meeting was written up by Sam Epstein, the author of the 1946 Rutgers-sponsored book on streptomycin,
Miracles from Microbes
, and who was now a paid consultant to Waksman’s legal team. According to Epstein’s account of the meeting, all four former graduates agreed that
    Schatz made no unique contribution to streptomycin because (1) he was, like other members of the staff, carrying out Dr. Waksman’s directions; (2) doing no independent work; (3) the part done by Schatz could have been done by any