By Alex Gordon in Haifa, Israel
On July 20, 1888, in the small Ukrainian village of Nova Pryluka near Vinnytsia (Russian Empire), a boy named Selman Abraham was born into a religious Jewish family of Waksman. His parents rented a plot of land and ran a haberdashery shop. Selman graduated from the local cheder, where he studied the Torah and Talmud. But his mother understood the limitations of such an education, and when her son turned ten, she hired private tutors for him. With their help, he thoroughly studied the Russian language and literature, history, mathematics, geography, and German and French languages. His mother played a decisive role in raising and educating her son; she encouraged his curiosity and his strong desire for knowledge. At that time, the family suffered a tragedy: Selman’s two-year-old sister died of diphtheria, and although there were remedies for this disease, they were unavailable to the remote Ukrainian village. As the little girl was dying, her nine-year-old brother in the next room was crying out of pity for his beloved sister and helplessness to do anything to help her. Perhaps that’s when he decided to make saving sick people his profession.
After an unsuccessful attempt to enter the Zhytomyr Gymnasium, Zalman decided that only Odesa could satisfy his insatiable thirst for knowledge: “A new world and new horizons opened up before me. A wonderful university and five high schools filled me with hope for the future.” In 1909, Zalman successfully entered one of the Odessa gymnasiums, passing exams for five grades at once. He finished high school externally just a year later. A year after he finished high school, Selman’s mother passed away – his main inspiration for all his successes. The father remarried soon after, which led to a rift in his relationship with his son, who did not accept his father’s quick decision.
Weighing his chances of getting into university as a Jew living in the Pale of Settlement, Zalman wrote: “Admission to a Russian university was out of the question (due to the numerus clausus – A. G.) Why go back home where there’s no mother? What could I have become? Another intellectual without a job and without a home? Jews in Russia live in constant fear. […] There is no hope for the future.”
Selman decided to leave Russia forever and move to the United States to live with his mother’s sisters. On November 2, 1910, he arrived in Philadelphia. In September 1911, Waksman became a student at the New Jersey State College of Agriculture at Rutgers University, from which he graduated in 1915 with a Bachelor of Science degree in agricultural science. Starting his research there in soil microbiology, he received his master’s degree in 1916, along with US citizenship. On August 4, 1916, Selman married Deborah Mitnik. They had one son, Byron H. Waksman, M.D., who was an assistant professor at Harvard University Medical School and a professor of microbiology at Yale University Medical School.
In the spring of 1918, Waksman defended his doctoral dissertation in biochemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, and in July of the same year, he returned to the agricultural college at Rutgers, where he lectured on soil microbiology. In 1931, Waksman was appointed Professor of Soil Microbiology at Rutgers University. When the Department of Microbiology was established at the university, Waksman became its head. The story of the creation of streptomycin, intended to conquer tuberculosis, unfolded within the walls of this university.
The tuberculosis bacillus was discovered by Robert Koch in 1882. Despite all of Koch’s efforts to find a cure for the disease that was taking the lives of millions, he was never able to do so. Over the following decades, several scientists made unsuccessful attempts to find a cure for tuberculosis.
The Selmans’ love for the land began in childhood. Even after becoming world-renowned, this American microbiologist and biochemist once said, “It all started with Ukrainian black soil. I thot of him always, never forgetting him, neither in Odessa, nor in American college, nor at university. How could one forget about him? I can still smell the charming scents of the Ukrainian steppe.” Waksman’s success in scientific discovery was due to his ability to ask questions of nature itself. One day, he was surprised by how few microorganisms capable of causing infectious diseases in humans and animals there were in the soil. The thot of black soil led to the greatest discovery. Working on the problem of tuberculosis control, Waksman first proved that tuberculosis bacilli die in the soil. Later, he made one of the most important discoveries in human history – that soil produces special substances that can be used to fight tuberculosis. After proving that soil produces special healing substances, Waksman discovered a substance that cures tuberculosis, but a drug was needed that would kill the tuberculosis bacillus while leaving the guinea pigs alive and healthy. In 1943, he was assisted in this endeavor by his graduate student, Albert Schatz, who finally discovered streptomycin. At the first international conference where the results of clinical trials were presented, the high effectiveness of streptomycin in combating the “great white plague” – tuberculosis – was recognized.
Thanks to Waksman’s scientific research in 1945, humanity received the first effective chemotherapeutic drug for treating tuberculosis. As it turned out later, streptomycin could also be used successfully in the treatment of cholera, typhoid fever, and other diseases. In 1948, Waksman and Schatz patented “streptomycin and a process for its production.”
In 1952, Selman Waksman was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine “for his discovery of streptomycin, the first antibiotic effective against tuberculosis.” In his speech at the award ceremony, Arvid Wallgren, a member of the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute noted, “Unlike the discovery of penicillin by Professor Alexander Fleming, which was largely due to chance, the development of streptomycin was the result of the long, systematic, and tireless work of a large group of scientists.” Noting that streptomycin had already saved thousands of human lives, Wallgren hailed the laureate as “one of humanity’s greatest benefactors.”
Waksman transferred the exclusive rights to streptomycin to the university where it was discovered. Waksman spent most of his honorarium on building the Microbiological Institute, which he directed until his retirement – under his leadership, several dozen more new antibiotics were discovered.
In 1950, Selman Waksman was made a Knight of the Legion of Honor. He was awarded honorary doctorates from the University of Liège and Rutgers University, and was a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, the US National Research Council, the Society of American Bacteriologists, the Soil Science Society of America, the American Chemical Society, and the Society for Experimental Biology and Medicine. After retiring from the university in 1958, Waksman continued to write articles and give lectures about antibiotics in various cities across the United States, remaining the head of American scientists working on soil microbiology.
Waksman passed away on August 16, 1973, in Hyannis, Massachusetts. He believed in the healing power of the earth until his death: “G-d created medicines from the earth, and He, the Wisest, will not be averse to them.”
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Alex Gordon is a professor emeritus of physics at the University of Haifa and at Oranim, the Academic College of Education, and the author of 12 books