Experiment Eleven

by Peter Pringle

  The British government controlled what little was available, but the controls didn’t always work, of course. Some black-market supplies got through. And the British press and the BBC featured heartrending appeals for children in desperate need of the drug. Government officials were embarrassed; the new miracle drug was in use in America, Britain’s closest ally, and none was available in Britain. “Is there really any justification for these BBC SOS messages?” growled one government official. “... These imply that there is no system by which the available supply can be distributed to cases of greatest need.” The government feared the rise of a wider black market for streptomycin, just like the one for penicillin. In America, there were reports that such a market already existed.

  The public reaction might have been more extreme if it had been generally known that at Porton Down supplies had been found to test for antidotes to biological weapons that so far had not been used, even in the last brutal months of the world war.

  Merck had supplied Porton with two batches of streptomycin for its own tests on the plague, which particularly interested the British. The Porton scientists used two strains of the plague from Africa and found that streptomycin was “highly efficient and non-toxic.” In a top secret report in 1945, government scientists at Porton concluded that streptomycin had great promise in combating half of the possible biological weapons then being considered. Its activity against TB was “particularly noteworthy.” Each of the potential weapons was letter coded, and in total they are a measure of how far the biological weapons program had advanced on each side of the Atlantic. Decoded, with results, they included N (anthrax), “apparently highly effective”; US (porcine brucellosis), “good protection in chick embryos”; and UL (tularemia), “strikingly successful.” But streptomycin had “no protective effective” against LA (glanders, which occurs primarily in horses, but has a high death rate in humans) or SI (psittacosis, or parrot disease, spread in bird feces and producing severe pneumonia-type symptoms in humans).

  Of the sixteen copies made of the report, three went to Fort Detrick, the U.S. biological weapons research center, and one went to George Merck, still head of the U.S. Biological Warfare Committee. The British public was fed a different story.

  The British answer to the shortage of supplies was to emphasize streptomycin’s problems. A government statement to the Times warned that “in the very small number of patients with tubercular meningitis whose life has been prolonged by the treatment there has nearly always been permanent serious mental derangement, blindness and deafness. Steps are being taken to speed up production in this country, but not enough is known about this drug at present to justify the Government making it more freely available.”

  Selman Waksman had been an extraordinarily effective salesman in the U.S. media for streptomycin’s therapeutic powers—and had also been nominated (unsuccessfully) in 1946 by an American physician for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. If Waksman knew about his nomination he didn’t mention it, but he was furious at the British for their public disparagement of his wonder drug. He cabled one of his contacts in the British drug industry, Sir Jack Drummond, research director of the drug company Boots, and asked him for background to the Times article. The situation was a “rather complicated one,” Drummond replied. First, it was natural for physicians to be impatient because the drug was unavailable. Britain was behind in producing it, and there was a “real danger” that “happy-go-lucky” trials would be made in a “hit-and-miss” fashion with “little sense of scientific control or accuracy.” Any supplies had been allocated by the government for official clinical trials. In the circumstances, the government’s position was “a fair one, even if it erred on the side of caution.”

  NO COUNTRY NEEDED antibiotics of all types more desperately in the post-war world than Japan. Remarkably, the Japanese had managed to smuggle scientific papers describing penicillin production through Germany, and by 1944, when U.S. marines landed in the Marshall Islands, the Japanese had started to plan their own production. But only tiny amounts were available, and they also needed streptomycin. Five hundred TB patients were dying every day, but it would be some years before Waksman and Rutgers could agree on the terms of production with Japanese companies. In the meantime, the United States began testing its new atomic bombs in the same Marshall Islands, an exercise that surprisingly led to the discovery of yet another antibiotic, just like Albert Schatz’s but from a different actinomycete. This time, however, the discovery was not exactly welcomed by Waksman.

  On July 1, 1946, at eight o’clock in the morning, the U.S. Air Force dropped an atomic bomb on the Bikini Atoll, in the Pacific. It was the fourth atomic detonation, after the test in the New Mexico desert at Alamogordo and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

  Watching the test from the deck of a hospital ship, ten miles upwind, was a lanky, fair-haired Ph.D. student from Selman Waksman’s laboratory named Donald Johnstone. Like Schatz, he had been drafted into the army in 1942, but unlike Schatz, he had been sent to the European front. He spent the last months of the war in a field hospital in Germany.

  On his return to Rutgers, he volunteered to be a member of a team of biologists monitoring what happened to the flora and fauna of the land and waters of Bikini when the bomb exploded. The scientific team was a small part of the forty-two-thousand-strong force gathered to monitor the tests. The U.S. Navy had assembled an unmanned fleet of more than ninety vessels, including three captured German and Japanese ships, to see the effects of the blast on them.

  “We were on deck around eight in the morning with our eye masks distributed by the Navy,” Johnstone recalled. “They had such dark lenses you couldn’t see anything. Instructions came over the loudspeaker—to put on our masks and put our arms up across our faces. At the moment of the explosion, we were told to turn away, and when we were allowed to turn back we saw the mushroom cloud.”

  The bomb was between fifteen hundred and two thousand feet off target and had only what the navy called a “transient effect” on the target flotilla, but it still sank five ships. About ten days later, Johnstone and the other biologists, equipped with their own Geiger counters to measure radiation, were allowed onto the island to take samples. The Pentagon was interested in what happened to the bacteria in the waters stirred up by the bomb blast, but Johnstone was more interested in the actinomycetes in the coral sands. These sands had a high pH, which Johnstone knew was ideal for actinomycetes.

  In the days prior to the test, Johnstone had collected sandy soil samples and tested them in his ship’s laboratory against known pathogens he had brought with him from Rutgers. He found several promising zones of antagonism, and when the Bikini bomb tests were over, he took the microbes home and grew them in petri dishes in the basement lab at the Department of Microbiology—the same lab in which Schatz had found streptomycin in 1943.

  Within a few weeks, he found a culture that produced an antibiotic with almost exactly the same powers to destroy harmful microbes as streptomycin, including nonpathogenic strains of Mycobacterium—the same ones, from the Rutgers culture collection, that Schatz had first used against his strains 18-16 and D-1.

  Three years after Schatz’s discovery, Johnstone had found another actinomycete, an entirely different species, that apparently produced streptomycin. In fact, in all of his two or three hundred cultures from Bikini, Johnstone never saw a single A. griseus. And his discovery was nothing to do with the atom bomb radiating microbes on the beach and producing mutants that then produced streptomycin. He had collected his cultures before the blast.

  Waksman told him to check his experiments, just as he had told Schatz to check his on A. griseus, and then write them up for publication. They agreed on a name, Actinomyces bikiniensis, and they called the new antibiotic streptomycin II. On May 15, 1947, Johnstone announced the discovery at a meeting of the Society of American Bacteriologists in Philadelphia. SCIENTIST TELLS OF NEW DRUG: STREPTOMYCIN NO. 2 CAME FROM BIKINI, reported the Philadelphia Eve
ning Bulletin. Like its predecessor, the newspaper said, it worked against the tuberculosis germ.

  But Johnstone added that his streptomycin II was slightly better than streptomycin I. Two-tenths of a unit of streptomycin I were needed to accomplish the same effect against the TB germ as was produced by one-tenth of a unit of streptomycin II.

  After the meeting, he suddenly found himself surrounded by drug company representatives wanting him to go work for them, but “I told them no, I wanted to stay in basic research at a university,” he later recounted.

  When he got back to Rutgers, Dr. Waksman “was beside himself,” Johnstone recalled. Waksman told him that the newspaper stories were “embarrassing.” The composition of the new drug that Johnstone had discovered was not yet known; it looked like streptomycin, but no one yet knew whether it was really the same thing, as the reports had said.

  “You better get out there and give the newspapers an account so you won’t embarrass the rest of the world,” Waksman said. Johnstone followed his professor’s order: “I gave a report blasting the [original] report that it was something new and better.”

  What Johnstone did not know at the time was that Waksman was in the middle of applying for a “product” patent for streptomycin. Waksman was asking the patent examiner to grant rights for the substance streptomycin, as produced by A. griseus. He apparently did not want to be distracted by another, similar discovery.

  11 • Dr. Schatz Goes to Albany

  THE SAME MONTH AS THE BIKINI test, July 1946, Vivian graduated from the Women’s College. Uncle Joe bought Schatz a secondhand car, and the young couple made their way to Albany, in upstate New York, where Schatz would start his new career as a civil servant employed by the state’s Department of Health. Robert Clothier, the president of Rutgers, gave Schatz a farewell letter expressing his “sense of regret” that Schatz was leaving. “It has been a source of great satisfaction, both official and personal, to have had you associated with us and I hope that continued success and happiness will be yours.” Schatz was pleased to have the letter even though he realized it was mostly a formality. A more genuine letter came from a member of the staff of Plant Pathology, who recalled that Waksman, “in the presence of several others,” had said, “Schatz was the most brilliant student I ever had.” It was said “in all sincerity.”

  But there was no farewell letter from Waksman himself, and Schatz had not expected one. Uncle Joe had been keeping his vigil on the media. Time magazine had run a story on “Streptomycin Wonders” with the news that the drug was now being distributed to sixteen hundred U.S. hospitals. It was “a triumph for the drug’s discovery in 1944 by Rutgers’s microbiologist Selman A. Waksman.” Schatz wasn’t mentioned. The New Jersey Journal of Pharmacy had run a story on the discovery after interviewing Waksman. The story described the discovery as a “product of extensive studies in soil microbiology by Dr. Waksman.” Using his Uncle Joe nom de plume, Schatz complained, and the journal obliged with a correction. While the credit it had given Waksman was accurate, it “does not mean that sole credibility for the discovery ... belongs to him. Dr. Waksman would be the last to make such a claim ... Today, practically no major discovery in science is the product of one man’s work.” If Waksman saw the correction, and Schatz was sure that he did, as he read everything, then he made no comment.

  The staff of the department of microbiology on the steps of the administration building after Albert quit Rutgers. Selman Waksman is in the front row wearing a bow tie, with Dr. Starkey (left) and Dr. Geiger (right). In the back row is Donald Johnstone (left), and in the next row, fourth from the left, is Doris Jones (ca. 1947). (Special Collections and Archives, Rutgers University Libraries)

  SCHATZ HOPED THAT the storm over the patent had blown over. Waksman had not mentioned it again, and Schatz was keen to forget it and begin his new life with Vivian away from Rutgers. He started a regular correspondence with Waksman, writing at least once a month, telling him how he was getting on and sending “regards to the group.” He even asked Waksman for a photograph that he could put on his desk, and Waksman sent him one.

  These letters were always friendly and personal. Schatz would tell Waksman if he felt he was not doing so well. He found he was not good at handling pressure from above. “I don’t mind work and I have not been loafing here by any means. But it ‘feels’ different when I drive myself. But I suppose this will always be with me, so I’d better get used to it.”

  Waksman responded with concern and advice. He suggested that Schatz belonged in a “pure research organization”—Caltech, in Pasadena, for example. He should have “no difficulty” in getting a fellowship from the U.S. Public Health Service, or Merck. Or Schatz might like to take a year off in Europe, or even Russia, if the situation improved sufficiently to welcome foreign visitors.

  ALBANY WAS CERTAINLY not the expected career move for a brilliant student who had played a key role in the discovery of the world’s most-talked-about new miracle cure. The city itself was dull. The capital of New York State lived in the long shadow of New York City, 150 miles to the south, and was the seat of a corrupt state legislature.

  Even so, the Health Department’s Division of Laboratories and Research, where Schatz worked, had an international reputation. Known as the “Division,” it was founded in 1880 as a combination of a scientific laboratory doing pure and applied research, an educational institution, and an operating public health service. It was respected by scientists worldwide. The Division’s director, Gilbert Dalldorf, who had joined in 1945, was concerned that the successes of penicillin and streptomycin against bacteria would make public health researchers complacent about diseases caused by fungi and especially viruses, for which there was no cure.

  Dalldorf had led a “determined effort” to establish virus studies at the Division at the beginning of 1946, and Schatz joined the virus team. But funds for the Department of Health were limited. Schatz found the labs poorly equipped, lacking enough egg incubators and mice cages to do adequate experiments. Plans for a new virus building kept being postponed because real estate prices were high after the end of the war. Another reason was that Governor Thomas Dewey was planning a run for the presidency against Harry Truman, and with his eye on the 1948 election, he was using the state’s coffers for political favors, not the civil service, which faced pay and staff cuts.

  Schatz kept Waksman informed of these problems, and Waksman offered fatherly advice and urged him not to be discouraged. He recalled the shortages at Rutgers after World War One: “We almost had to make our own test tubes and petri dishes.” Any beginning was difficult, he counseled. “One should figure about a year before the laboratory is well-organized.”

  Overall, Waksman must have been relieved that Schatz had left Rutgers—he could now make his own way with streptomycin—and Schatz had readily accepted the Albany job because he was keen to get out from under Waksman’s wing. He was also now married and in need of the money. Pure research, unattached to business or the government, was what he would have preferred to be doing, but in 1946 such work was barely possible in America without a fellowship, and while Waksman had mentioned the idea of a fellowship, he had not offered to help him find one.

  The ever-restless Schatz turned to other things. “I’m determined to get a general cultural education,” he wrote Doris Jones. “This business of science, science, straight science, technical stuff and more technical stuff seems to make scientists among the dullest people in the world. There are different people, different ways of life, different philosophies, there are histories and arts. I shall now begin to learn some of this for man is emotional as well as intellectual ... To develop one of these aspects without the other is to grow lopsided.” He told Waksman he was determined to become fluent in Russian. He had translated one Russian paper, only a page long, but it had taken him a whole day.

  Vivian found a job as a bacteriologist in a local hospital, but when Albert pointed out how unsanitary the place was, she quit. She found a differe
nt interest. Paul Robeson had been invited by Albany’s Israel African Methodist Episcopal Church to sing at a local school, but the city had refused to issue a permit because the House Un-American Activities Committee had linked Robeson to communists. Robeson was a Rutgers graduate, and Vivian joined the Let Paul Robeson Sing Committee, running flyers around town. A local judge ruled that Robeson could sing, provided he did not discuss politics. The FBI was following Vivian and had opened a file on her, though she would not know this until seven years later. In 1952, when she and Albert were living in Philadelphia, the FBI knocked on their door and asked Vivian about her colleagues on the protest committee. She told them she could not remember anything.

  BY THE BEGINNING of 1947, Schatz was thinking about a new job. He felt pressure to produce something on viruses, but did not have the means to do it. He had heard through the “grapevine” that he had not made the progress his supervisor had hoped for, he told Waksman, and he was spending most of his time isolating organisms antagonistic to pathogenic fungi. He was only “nibbling” at the bigger virus problem. “To be honest with you, I am not very much interested in these problems, but I am doing them because I must do something.” The equipment situation continued to interrupt his work. Even the supply of eggs was poor. “This morning was heartbreaking—12 good eggs alive out of 200!!” He was working hard. “Last weekend, I was in the lab for about 16 hours and I frequently stay until midnight, and then up again at 4 A.M.”