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Bug Eat Bug. Every place that is favorable for the growth of micro-organisms (and most places are) is a churning battleground of small, fierce creatures. A pinch of moist soil weighing one gram, for instance, may contain more bacteria (up to 2 billion) than there are people on earth. Among the ordinary creatures prowl savage protozoa engulfing them one by one. There is an underworld, too, made up of submicroscopic viruses, hardly more than big molecules, which often invade the larger organisms and multiply explosively.
Across such a battleground run waves of defeat and triumph. Whole populations of thriving creatures suddenly disappear and are replaced by new ones. Small, humble organisms, which have been living a hunted existence, turn belligerent and dominate the field.
Some of the quick changes in such a "mixed culture" are due to external influences, e.g., changes of temperature or a new food supply. But often the disappearance of a certain microorganism is the result of intramural chemical warfare. It has been knocked out by some other organism, secreting a deadly compound.
Man is a part of this incessant struggle: most, if not all, of the little creatures that cause man's diseases have enemies nearer their own size which can kill them off with chemical weapons. The warfare among the bugs* is called "antibiosis," and the chemical weapons of war are "antibiotics." Searchers for new antibiotics figuratively let bug eat bug; then the medical men take over the chemical weapons of the microscopic battlers and use them against the enemies of man.
What Is Life? Selman Abraham Waksman, famed U.S. expert at stirring up civil war among the bugs, was born in 1888 in the little Ukrainian village of Priluka, go miles from Kiev. His father Jacob spent most of his time making copper kitchenware in the nearby town of Vinnitsa, and young Selman was brought up almost entirely by his mother Fradia.
When his mother died in 1910, his strongest tie to the old country was cut. His father wanted him to go to Zurich to study industrial chemistry, but the boy had grown up in a fertile country and was fascinated each spring by the return of the generative cycle. Frequently he asked himself: What is life? How does it begin? How does it function?
Waksman first thought of studying medicine, but Russia was not the place for him to do that. With four friends from Priluka, he decided to try his luck in the U.S. The young Ukrainians landed at Philadelphia in November 1910, and Waksman went to stay with a cousin, Molki Kornblatt, and her husband Mendel, on their five-acre farm in Metuchen, N. J. He weeded the vegetable garden, fed the chickens and dug pestholes, while the Kornblatts' children helped him improve his English. Kornblatt gave him some advice which proved decisive: go to see Dr. Jacob Lipman, another Russian immigrant, head of the New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station at Rutgers.
Lipman argued that an agricultural school would be better for him than a medical school on microbiology. So in 1911 Waksman entered Rutgers' College of Agriculture.