MY EXPERIENCE IN WORLD WAR II: Albert Schatz, '42

MY EXPERIENCE IN WORLD WAR II

Albert Schatz, '42

When I entered Rutgers in 1938, I majored in agriculture. I wanted to be a farmer when I graduated because I had spent some time as a young boy on our family farm in Connecticut. But Dr. Jacob Joffe's course in Pedology changed my mind. Pedology is the science of the origin, formation, and distribution of soils. Dr.Joffe motivated me to get a Ph.D. degree in Pedology, but he had no funds available for a graduate student. So I began my graduate work in June, 1942, at the Ag School in Dr. Selman Waksman's Soil Microbiology Department, in the Administration Building (It is now called Martin Hall). I immediately began doing research in antibiotics and a fermentation to produce fumaric acid. I had a stipend of $40 a month. I lived in a small room in one of the greenhouses of the Department of Plant Physiology. Instead of paying rent, I worked part-time on a hydroponic project in the greenhouse.

I was drafted in November, 1942, and was a laboratory bacteriologist in the army hospital in Miami, Florida. At that time penicillin was available in limited amounts. Its use was therefore restricted to military personnel. Penicillin was effective in treating infections caused by what are called gram-positive bacteria. However, there was no antibiotic to treat infections caused by gram-negative bacteria (the two groups are differentiated by a staining procedure developed by the Danish bacteriologist Christian Gram). In many cases, the doctors at the army hospital wanted to know only whether the bacteria, which were causing infections, were gram-negative or gram-positive. I was shocked to see young men my age die of infections caused by gram-negative bacteria. Therefore, in my off-duty hours, I isolated microorganisms from Florida soils, and tested them by a simple cross-streak method in petri dishes, to see which ones inhibited the growth of gram-negative bacteria that I had isolated from sick soldiers. I sent test tube cultures of some of the microorganisms, which inhibited gram-negative bacteria, to Dr.Waksman. He wrote me that he would give them further study.

I was discharged from the army in June, 1943, because of a congenital abnormality in my lower spine, and resumed graduate work. Dr. Waksman wanted me to work on the fumaric acid fermentation, but I persuaded him to let me continue the search for a new antibiotic that I had been doing in the army. He agreed. Shortly thereafter, Drs. William Feldman and H. Corwin Hinshaw, at the Mayo Clinic, suggested that Waksman look for an antibiotic against tuberculosis (TB), for which there was then no effective antibiotic treatment. Dr.Waksman was disinclined to take on that project because he was afraid of tuberculosis. This disease had by then killed about a billion people in the last two centuries. That was more deaths than were caused by all other infectious diseases combined. However, I persuaded Dr. Waksman to let me do the TB project. He agreed, but, because I would be working with a virulent human strain of the tubercle bacillus, he transferred me from the laboratory adjacent to his office on the third floor of the Administration Building to the basement laboratory. He told me never to bring a culture of the tubercle bacillus to the third floor. And he never visited the basement laboratory.

I was highly motivated to find antibiotics that could be used to treat gram-negative infections because I had seen soldiers die of such infections. I was also highly motivated to find an antibiotic that could be used to treat tuberculosis because when I was a boy in Passaic, New Jersey, in the 1920s, I had seen neighbors die of TB. We then called it "consumption" because the disease literally consumed them. I knew people who coughed, and wasted away as they lost weight and died.

At about 2:00 PM on October, 1943, I realized I had discovered a new antibiotic which I called streptomycin. It inhibited the growth of both gram-negative bacteria and the tubercle bacillus. Dr Waksman listed me as the senior author on the two publications announcing the discovery of streptomycin and its ability to inhibit the growth of the tubercle bacillus in vitro. In January and February of 1944, I prepared the streptomycin which Drs. Hinshaw and Feldman at the Mayo Clinic used to test this new antibiotic for toxicity in guinea pigs. Streptomycin was the most important antibiotic since penicillin, which had been discovered in 1929. It was the first effective treatment for major diseases such as tuberculosis brucellosis, tularemia, and pneumonic plague, the most deadly form of bubonic plague also known as The Black Death.

I received my Ph.D. degree in 1945 after only 30 months of graduate work (I do not have a master's degree). My dissertation reported the discovery of streptomycin, its antibiotic activity, and its production. On April 28, 1994, Rutgers President Francis L. Lawrence awarded me the Rutgers Medal at the 50th Anniversary of the Discovery of Streptomycin. The citation, which accompanied the medal, includes the following comments, " ... in 1944 ... you became the co-discoverer of the important antibiotic, strepton1ycin, the first useful chemotherapeutic substance for the treatment of 'The Great White Plague,' or tuberculosis. This great discovery was made possible, in part, by your courageous use of virulent pathogenic cultures of Mycobacterium tuberculosis in your bioassay procedures. The world-wide impact of this discovery is now part of medical history." .

The Streptomycin patent, in the names of Waksman and Schatz produced an estimated $12,000,000 in royalties for the Rutgers Research and Endowment Foundation. This royalty money made it possible for Rutgers to establish the Waksman Institute.

I was pleased that during World War II, the research I did resulted in the discovery of streptomycin which has been saving people's lives since then. On March 21,1996, Senator Bob Dole, who was then a presidential candidate, wrote me on United States Senate letterhead, "During my recovery after World War II, streptomycin defeated an infection that threatened my life." I still receive letters from people all over the world who thank me for saving their lives when they had tuberculosis..

I have been awarded honorary degrees, medals, honorary membership in medical and scientific societies, and other recognition for the discovery of streptomycin.