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Added Atoms. Streptomycin does not cure all cases of tuberculosis, nor is it foolproof. In some patients it has caused such undesirable reactions as dizziness, ringing in the ears and temporary deafness. As the drug has been purified (it is now about 99% pure), these side effects have been cut down. Also, it was found in 1946 that two hydrogen atoms added chemically to the complex molecule of streptomycin ' produced an equally effective but less toxic variant. Called dihydrostreptomycin, the variant is now produced in two to three times the volume of ordinary streptomycin.
Dr. Waksman's great success did not change him visibly. He continued to work, as he does today, on the crowded third floor of an old, vine-covered building. His office, about the size of a hall bedroom, is cluttered with books and scientific papers. The laboratory next door, messy-looking like all biological laboratories, is also small and cramped; no one would guess that from its windows a great light had shone.
Dr. Waksman himself is more impressive than his setting. A smallish, somewhat stocky man with a faint Russian accent and a precise way of speaking, he has the great dignity that confident small men often have. When he speaks of the new institute that his discovery will pay for, his eyes light up. He sees the whopping financial success of his work only as a means to do future service.
At Home & Abroad. The intense activity which began in Waksman's laboratories in 1939 was matched in other labs in the U.S. and abroad. Among the first to join the hunt and bag a valuable drug was Yale University's Dr. Paul R. Burkholder, who found antibiotic-producing lichens on the cold slopes of Mt. Washington. Later, Burkholder switched to soils and, "to avoid stepping on Dr. Waksman's toes," decided to try foreign soils.
From a soil sample collected near Caracas, Venezuela, Burkholder isolated a Streptomyces which yielded a valuable antibiotic called chloramphenicol.* Almost simultaneously, Midwestern researchers isolated a seemingly identical microorganism with the same properties from soil found at Urbana, Ill. Says Waksman: "The remedies are in our own backyards." Despite Waksman's stay-at-home views ("And," says Burkholder, "he could be right"), Yale is sending people all over the world on soil-collecting trips.
Chloramphenicol plugged a big gap in the antibiotic field: it proved particularly deadly against the rickettsias, untouched by either penicillin or streptomycin. It gives doctors a weapon against typhus, parrot fever, and a venereal disease, lymphogranuloma, which is commonest in the Southern U.S. It also relieves and drastically shortens the course of whooping cough. By this property alone, it will save many children's lives.