Part of the answer lies in the need for fuel. Outside of Romania, there
wasn’t a decent-sized oil field between the Atlantic and the Urals,
mandating that the Nazi state exhaust their scientific resources in the
development of synthetic oil and synthetic rubber manufacturing. The
Germans clung to a partially effective class of drugs, the sulfa-based
antibacterials, and spent the rest of their assets and energies on propping
up their war machine.
Another major reason for the Nazi scientific failure was the reversal of
the educational system that made it the envy of the world in the first place.
The scientific autonomy that had been earned over the course of decades
suddenly vanished under Nazi control, while “American scientists,
universities, and the medical profession ... performed under minimal
control primarily in independent institutions, rather than in government
laboratories.”^17 In addition, the loss of so many gifted Jewish scientists,
either through murder or defection, weakened the talent pool of the
formerly proud German institutions.
They have never recovered their world leadership in chemistry and
biology.
On December 10, 1945, with Europe in tatters after the conclusion of
World War II, Alexander Fleming, Ernst Chain, and Howard Florey were
awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discovery and
development of penicillin. Although sulfanilamide was antibacterial, it
was not a molecule made by an organism. Sulfa drugs are therefore not
“antibiotics,” as coined by scientist Selman Waksman, which he defined as
“a chemical substance produced by microorganisms.”^18 One year before
the Nobel ceremony in Stockholm, a tuberculosis patient at the Mineral
Springs Sanatorium (near the Rochester, Minnesota, site of the Mayo
Clinic), received the first dose of streptomycin, forever changing the
treatment of tuberculosis, the development of antibiotics, and the world.
Streptomycin was discovered by Selman Waksman and Albert Schatz,
soil scientists who specialized in the study of actinomycetes, a sub-order
of bacteria that make the soil their home and have mold-like branching
filaments. Additionally, actinomycetes were presumed to secrete
antibiotic-like molecules, due to their ability to fight off other bacteria in
their loamy world. Waksman and his colleagues at Rutgers University had
spent the 1920s and 1930s collecting soil samples and testing the
thousands of bacteria that were dredged up. A teaspoon of soil might