contain billions of bacteria—competing for scarce resources and evolving
molecular weapons to defend themselves from other bacteria and various
members of the plant and animal kingdoms.
The first compounds isolated from soil-borne bacteria, in 1939 by
French-American René Dubos (who later won the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for
his book So Human an Animal), were effective against other bacteria, but
were also toxic to mammalian cells. It would become obvious (in time)
that the most effective antibiotics would target structures and machinery
peculiar to bacteria, sparing animal tissues. Although the 1939 substances
were clinical failures, they did inspire the microbe hunters to continue the
quest. The overwhelming challenge seemed beyond scale: investigate
thousands and thousands of bacterial species and somewhat arbitrarily test
for antibacterial properties.
Despite the daunting task, Waksman and his followers developed a
protocol for isolating a bacterium that produced a minimally toxic, yet
clinically effective drug. Years later, he said, “We isolated one hundred
thousand strains of streptomycetes (as actinomycetes were then known).
Ten thousand were active on agar media, one thousand were active in broth
culture, one hundred were active in animals, ten had activity against
experimental TB, and one turned out to produce streptomycin.”^19 While
these numbers were rough approximations, they do capture the concentric
circles of possible antidotes to disease; more intriguingly, although
Waksman is the genius who pioneered antibiotic research (and rightly
earned the Nobel Prize in 1952), the quote is very likely inaccurate, as it
seems that Schatz himself carried out the critical research on streptomycin
in isolation, from June to October 1943.
The Merck-funded research at Rutgers came to the attention of Mayo
Clinic researchers William Feldman and Corwin Hinshaw. The Mayo
Clinic had transformed from a father-and-sons practice in the tiny town of
Rochester in the 1880s into one of the world’s greatest research
institutions. This was accomplished by embracing Listerism,
implementing modern cellular pathology, nurturing collaboration among
scientists and physicians, and the unselfish reorganization into a not-for-
profit charity.
At the Mayo Clinic, William Feldman was a world-class veterinary
pathologist and Corwin Hinshaw was a physician with an interest in
bacteriology. Feldman and Hinshaw were obsessed with lung disease and