Selman Waksman

Origins and early life

Selman Abraham Waksman was born on 22 July 1888 in Priluka, near Kiev, in the Russian Empire, now Nova Pryluka in Ukraine, the son of Jacob Waksman and Fradia London. He was raised in a Jewish home, by a mother who ran her own dry-goods business and lived, as his biographer puts it, in the fine Jewish tradition, and for some years he studied the Bible and the Talmud.

Work and career

After his mother's death he passed his examinations at the Fifth Gymnasium in Odessa in 1910 and left at once for the United States, where a cousin who farmed chickens in New Jersey took him in. He entered Rutgers College in 1911 on a state scholarship, took a doctorate in biochemistry at the University of California in 1918 and returned to Rutgers for the rest of his career, studying above all the microbes of the soil.

From 1939 he and his colleagues screened soil microorganisms systematically against the bacteria that cause disease, and his laboratory isolated actinomycin in 1940, streptomycin in 1943 and neomycin in 1948, among more than twenty such substances. Streptomycin, isolated in 1943 by Albert Schatz, a graduate student in his laboratory, from the bacterium Streptomyces griseus, became the first effective medicine against tuberculosis, and Waksman gave the name antibiotics to the whole class of these natural inhibitors.

Most of the royalties went to Rutgers, which built with them the Institute of Microbiology that he directed first, and with part of his own share he and his wife Deborah Mitnik set up a Foundation for Microbiology. He received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for 1952, unshared, for his discovery of streptomycin, the first antibiotic effective against tuberculosis.

Later years

He died in Hyannis, Massachusetts, on 16 August 1973 and is buried at Woods Hole, under a stone that carries, in Hebrew and in English, a verse of Isaiah: the earth will open and bring forth salvation.