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Author: Peter Pringle
ISBN : B00745YXO8
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In 1943, Albert Schatz, a young Rutgers College Ph.D. student, worked on a wartime project in microbiology professor Selman Waksman's lab, searching for an antibiotic to fight infections on the front lines and at home. In his eleventh experiment on a common bacterium found in farmyard soil, Schatz discovered streptomycin, the first effective cure for tuberculosis, one of the world's deadliest diseases.
As director of Schatz's research, Waksman took credit for the discovery, belittled Schatz's work, and secretly enriched himself with royalties from the streptomycin patent filed by the pharmaceutical company Merck. In an unprecedented lawsuit, young Schatz sued Waksman, and was awarded the title of "co-discoverer" and a share of the royalties. But two years later, Professor Waksman alone was awarded the Nobel Prize. Schatz disappeared into academic obscurity.
For the first time, acclaimed author and journalist Peter Pringle unravels the intrigues behind one of the most important discoveries in the history of medicine. The story unfolds on a tiny college campus in New Jersey, but its repercussions spread worldwide. The streptomycin patent was a breakthrough for the drug companies, overturning patent limits on products of nature and paving the way for today's biotech world. As dozens more antibiotics were found, many from the same family as streptomycin, the drug companies created oligopolies and reaped big profits. Pringle uses firsthand accounts and archives in the United States and Europe to reveal the intensely human story behind the discovery that started a revolution in the treatment of infectious diseases and shaped the future of Big Pharma.
Direct download links available for Free Download Experiment Eleven: Dark Secrets Behind the Discovery of a Wonder Drug [Kindle Edition]
- File Size: 2371 KB
- Print Length: 288 pages
- Publisher: Walker Books; 1 edition (May 8, 2012)
- Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00745YXO8
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
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Free Download Experiment Eleven: Dark Secrets Behind the Discovery of a Wonder Drug
In the first half of his long career as a journalist, Pringle was one of a celebrated team of investigative reporters on Harold Evans' Sunday Times in London. (That brought "Those Are Real Bullets," a reconstruction of the 1972 Bloody Sunday killings in Northern Ireland, which Pringle co-authored with a colleague on that team.) Then he turned foreign correspondent, working in both Washington and, for some years, in Moscow. Settled finally in New York, he turned his skills to investigations into biology. "Food Inc" was an early look at the rise and power of agribiz. "The Murder of Nikolai Vavilov" drew on his experience in Russia to unravel the fate of a Soviet-era biologist who challenged Lysenko. By "Day of the Dandelion" Pringle knew enough to venture into fiction, creating a botanical detective: The Man from Kew. Now comes "Experiment Eleven", which --- as someone who has known Pringle for many years --- strikes me as his most ambitious effort yet, also his most technically adept.
It's a story of scientific fraud. Not just any fraud. The fraud behind the awarding of a Nobel Prize in 1952 to Selman Waksman --- and Waksman alone --- for his discovery of streptomycin in 1943. Streptomycin was a hugely important advance. After penicillin, it was the pioneering antibiotic: it cured tuberculosis. So its discoverer well deserved a Nobel. But the real discoverer, Albert Schatz, had been erased from the record by Waksman. Schatz, as a 23-year-old grad student working in the basement of Waksman's soil laboratory at Rutgers, had not merely identified the strain of microbes which are, so to speak, the raw form of streptomycin.
Especially in modern times, a great scientific discovery is only rarely attributable to a single individual. Particularly in experiment, important work often involves legions of dedicated researchers and the ones responsible for the critical insights are not always easily defined. And too often, scientists are accorded the honour of discovery only through seniority. Maurice Wilkins shared the Nobel Prize for elucidating the structure of DNA when he did little more than manage the laboratory where the original X-ray diffraction data were taken. Rosalind Franklin, who actually produced the critical data, received nothing. Even in pure theory, the waters can be muddy. The discovery of the mechanism by which gauge mesons acquire mass in a gauge theory with a spontaneously broken symmetry is most frequently attributed, especially in the popular press, to Peter Higgs when most of the credit should be allocated to Guralnik, Hagen and Kibble. And at least half a dozen others could be cited who resolved part of the mystery.
This book tells a very different type of story. Selman Waksman has been almost universally regarded as the sole discoverer of Streptomycin, which was derived from fungi present in New Jersey farmyard soil. However, it was his student, Albert Schatz, who first isolated the substance and demonstrated its antibacterial properties. At first, Waksman "graciously" acknowledged his student's contributions, allowing him the place of senior author on the first published papers and sharing a patent with him.