When Rutgers University needed to save some money during the war winter of 1941-42, a budget official had a bright idea: Why not fire Selman Waksman, an obscure Ukrainian-born microbiologist who was getting $4,620 a year for "playing around with microbes in the soil?" That sort of fun & games, the moneyman pointed out, had never really paid off.
Fortunately for Rutgers — and for mankind — Dean William H. Martin of the College of Agriculture saved Dr. Waksman from the ax. Within two years Selman Waksman's "playing around with microbes" had paid off with one of the biggest jackpots that has ever gushed from a scientist's laboratory. Dr. Waksman (rhymes with boxman) had become the discoverer of streptomycin, which ranks next to penicillin among the antibiotics and is the first of these "wonder drugs" to show hopeful results in the treatment of tuberculosis.
Today, the department of microbiology is the brightest spot on the Rutgers campus at New Brunswick, N. J., and its chairman, Dr. Selman Waksman, is one of the world's top microbiologists. He has won for his university not only fame but fortune. Streptomycin for a 60-day course of treatment costs $60 to $80. A dozen chemical companies are turning out the new wonder drug, and for every gram (1/28 of an ounce) sold, Rutgers gets 2¢. By last week, the university's harvest of pennies had reached more than $2,000,000.
With this money (and more still to come), Rutgers and Waksman are planning to build an Institute of Microbiology. Quiet, modest Dr. Waksman will enjoy the new equipment and the more spacious laboratories. For himself he asks little. By taking advantage of the unusually liberal Rutgers policy in such financial matters, he might have claimed all the proceeds of his discovery and become a millionaire. But he turned over his royalty rights to the Rutgers Research and Endowment Foundation with the mild observation: "Rutgers won't let me starve."*
Breakthrough. The exciting science of microbiology is one of the fastest advancing fronts of modern medicine. Ever since Louis Pasteur discovered that many of man's most dreaded diseases are caused by microorganisms, scientists have searched for a drug that would kill the little villains without damaging the tissues of their human victims. A few chemical drugs were synthesized. Salvarsan, "606," developed by Ehrlich, proved to be effective against syphilis. Much later, in 1935, came the sulfa drugs, the medical wonders of their day. But none of the chemical "magic bullets" was effective against more than a few disease organisms, and all of them were apt to have dangerous toxic effects on human tissues.
The discovery of penicillin (almost by accident) in 1928 was a conspicuous breakthrough. Britain's Dr. Alexander Fleming noticed that the mold Penicillium notatum secretes a substance that kills certain bacteria growing on culture dishes. Later it was found that the secretion also kills many disease-producing organisms in the human body. It also does its job without any appreciable damage to human tissues. Fleming's great discovery focused attention on the fact that some micro-organisms are powerful chemical weapons that can be used against other disease-causing microorganisms.