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Gold Dust. In American Cyanamid Co.'s Lederle Laboratories at Pearl River, N.Y. another Streptomyces was found to secrete a gold-colored, germ-killing substance. Dr. Benjamin M. Duggar, the discoverer, called this antibiotic aureomycin. First used on human patients at New York's Harlem Hospital by Dr. Louis T. Wright, the "gold dust" worked wonders for victims of lymphogranuloma. Like Chloromycetin, it deals with many of the rickettsias. In treating brucellosis (undulant fever), aureomycin is likely to replace the streptomycin-sulfadiazine combination much used at present.
This year (TIME, April 4), Dr. Waksman announced that he and an assistant, Hubert Lechevalier, had isolated another antibiotic from a soil microbe which Waksman named Streptomyces fradiae in honor of his mother. The drug, neomycin, is as effective as streptomycin against tubercle bacilli in the test tube, and Waksman hopes that it can be combined with streptomycin in treating tuberculosis.
There is need for such a combination because streptomycin, more than any other of the antibiotics, tends to develop resistant strains of germs. Some strains learn to live with it, even becoming dependent on it—as if a rat began to fatten on rat poison. The resistant strains can be highly dangerous; if they infect another victim, he cannot be cured by streptomycin or anything else yet known.
The Fat Farmer. It is still too early to put neomycin among the widely useful antibiotics because of possible harmful side effects such as kidney damage. But it has already been used with success as a last desperate measure. Just before Labor Day, a fat but unhappy farmer was admitted to Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia. He had a deep-seated infection caused by a common microbe, Aerobacter aerogenes, which is usually a pushover for penicillin or streptomycin.
But the farmer's germs were a special strain. They had licked their weight in penicillin, and come back to knock out streptomycin, chloramphenicol and aureomycin. Unchecked, they were a sure bet to kill the farmer. Dr. Garfield G. Duncan pitted the tough germs in a test tube against neomycin. The drug murdered them.
Then Dr. Duncan tried Waksman's supposedly dangerous drug on the patient. Within a few hours the infection was licked, and a few days later the fat farmer walked out, pain-free for the first time in years. Says Dr. Duncan: "There may not be many cases like this, but if we can save only one or two patients a year with a drug like neomycin, that drug has justified its existence."
Select Club. Dr. Waksman lives in the same modest six-room house that he has lived in for 25 years. He manages to make clothes look shapeless and still wears high-laced black shoes. His only son, Byron Halsted Waksman (30, and an M.D.), is on the staff of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. Dr. Waksman and his wife often go to concerts in New York (Mrs. Waksman likes the more serious works; he likes "musical music").