# Fame.am profile — machine-readable export
# Canonical URL: https://fame.am/person/selman-waksman
# Generated: 2026-08-31T13:58:53.729Z

schema: https://schema.org/Person
url: "https://fame.am/person/selman-waksman"
name: "Selman Waksman"
slug: "selman-waksman"
description: "He coined the word \"antibiotic\" in its modern sense and built the research machinery that pulled streptomycin—the first real weapon against tuberculosis—out of soil bacteria. The Nobel came in 1952, then the lawsuit from the student who'd actually isolated it."
tagline: "American scientist, biochemist, microbiologist who discovered Streptomycin and many antibiotics"
image: "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:FilePath/Selman_Waksman_NYWTS.jpg?width=1200"
gender: "male"
country:
  name: "United States"
  isoCode: "US"
category:
  name: "Scientists"
  slug: "scientists"
profileType:
  name: "Scientist"
  slug: "scientist"
  entityType: "https://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q39631"
birthDate: "1888-07-22"
deathDate: "1973-08-16"
livingStatus: "DECEASED"
scores:
  popularity:           56.99
  momentum:             0
  historical:           23.46484133333334
  currentAttention:     0
  sourceConfidence:     60
  profileCompleteness:  70
  trendDirection:       "FALLING"
ranks:
  global:   null
  country:  null
  category: null
tags:
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    slug: "doctors"
  - name: "Comedian"
    slug: "comedian"
  - name: "Stand Up"
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    title: "Selman Waksman"
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# bio (long form, separated for readability)
bio: |
  Selman Abraham Waksman left Russia in 1910, became a U.S. citizen six years later, and spent four decades as a biochemistry and microbiology professor at Rutgers. His research into how soil organisms decompose led to the discovery of streptomycin and more than fifteen other antibiotics—and he introduced the modern meaning of "antibiotic" to describe them. The work won him the 1952 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Patent royalties funded the Waksman Institute of Microbiology at Rutgers. Then Albert Schatz, the Ph.D. student who had discovered streptomycin in Waksman's lab, sued—claiming Waksman had minimized his role. In 2005, decades after Waksman's death in 1973, the lab's isolation of antibiotics earned an ACS National Historic Chemical Landmark, recognizing streptomycin as the first effective treatment for tuberculosis.