Like most scientific discoveries of modern times, streptomycin was found as a result of teamwork. Members of the 1943 team working on antibiotics in the Department of Microbiology at New Jersey's Rutgers University were Dr. Selman A. Waksman, head of the department, and a group of graduate students including Albert Schatz. By 1946, when Schatz left the campus, it was still not clear how rich a gold mine streptomycin would prove to be.
Then streptomycin royalties reached almost $1,000,000 a year (TIME, Nov. 7). Waksman assigned his patents to the Rutgers Research and Endowment Foundation. So did Dr. Schatz. But last week,...