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	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
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Society & Social Sciences

EXPERIMENT ELEVEN

Peter Pringle

Dark Secrets Behind the Discovery of a Wonder Drug

A wonder drug, a disputed Nobel Prize, and a patent that shaped modern medicine.

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 disease. 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. Two years later, Professor Waksman alone was awarded the Nobel Prize. Schatz disappeared into academic obscurity. 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. 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. Peter Pringle is a veteran British foreign correspondent and the author of several nonfiction books, including the New York Times Notable Book Food, Inc. and the bestselling Those Are Real Bullets, Aren’t They? He has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, and the Nation. He lives in New York City.

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Book Published 2012-05-01 by Walker & Company

Comments

A classic in the history of science. With forensic skill and narrative virtuosity, Pringle has at last told the true story of streptomycin; gripping in all the best ways.

A riveting narrative for readers interested in scientific discovery and those who enjoy books such as Paul de Kruif's Microbe Hunters.

The stage was set in 1943, when the future Nobel Laureate Selman Waksman headed the Department of Soil Microbiology at Rutgers University and President Roosevelt launched a major initiative to identify and develop antibiotics to treat animals and humans and to deal with the potential threat of biological warfare. Among the graduate students in the department was Albert Schatz, who was analyzing soil samples in an attempt to find an antibiotic that would cure tuberculosis. In his 11th experiment he succeeded, isolating two strains of a microbe—one from a soil sample and the other from a throat culture taken from a chicken's throat—given to him by a fellow graduate student. In fact, he had discovered the drug later to be named Streptomycin. Pringle gives a fascinating account of the steps on the road to turning it into a pharmaceutical—determining its effectiveness, testing for toxicity and side-effects, etc. Although the first announcement of the discovery was made jointly by the professor and his graduate student, Waksman began taking sole credit, pressuring Schatz into relinquishing patent rights to Rutgers and hiding the fact that he was being paid a significant percentage of the royalties. Ultimately, Schatz sued Waksman, and an out-of-court financial settlement was reached. Though it acknowledged Schatz's part in the discovery, Waksman's reputation and prestige remained intact and he alone was awarded a Nobel Prize. A gripping account of academic politics and the birth of the pharmaceutical industry.

Notebooks Shed Light on an Antibiotic’s Contested Discovery EVIDENCE A lab notebook belonging to Albert Schatz, left, with his supervisor, Selman A. Waksman, and discovered at Rutgers helps puts to rest a 70-year argument over credit for the Nobel-winning discovery of streptomycin. Read more...

Peter Pringle’s excellent book Experiment Eleven details how a simple discovery dominated and remodelled the lives of both these two scientists. It tells of a bitter legal fight over credit and a misallocated Nobel prize. And, like the best of dramas, it reaches outwards, to illuminate scientific behaviour at the time, and forwards, to change our perceptions of scientific ethics today.

Riveting history of the discovery of one of the most important drugs of the last century…. [Pringle] skillfully relates an important tale of a life-saving scientific discovery tarnished by egotism and injustice.