Selman Waksman

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.