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Image from Will Brinton Foundation
Life (Pringle 2012)
Life (Pringle 2012)
Albert Schatz was born in the United Kingdom on February 2, 1920 to Julius Schatz and Rachel Martin. After moving to a farm in New Jersey at a young age, Schatz attended Rutgers’ College of Agriculture for his bachelors and doctorate. After Rutgers, Schatz worked at Brooklyn College, the National Agricultural College, and then as the head of bacteriology at Philadelphia General Hospital. Schatz died on January 17, 2005 from pancreatic cancer.
Research (Pringle 2012)
Research (Pringle 2012)
Working on his Ph.D., Schatz set out to find a new antibiotic that would work against penicillin-resistant bacteria—including the causative agent of tuberculosis (Mycobacterium tuberculosis).
From Schatz's perspective, after three months of working alone in a basement laboratory, he identified the antibiotic he was looking for from two bacteria. It is disputed if Selman Waksman or Schatz coined the term streptomycin, but the published seminal paper included Schatz as the primary author, Elizabeth Bugie as second author, and Waksman as the final author.
However, this is where the credit-sharing ends as Waksman quickly changed the narrative to identify himself as the sole leader in the discovery of streptomycin and everyone else—including Schatz—as his assistants. A legal battle between Schatz and Waksman eventually led to Schatz receiving 3% of the streptomycin royalties and recognition for his contributions.
Relation to Elizabeth Bugie (Pringle 2012)
Relation to Elizabeth Bugie (Pringle 2012)
Bugie worked in the same laboratory as Schatz, but their paths do not seemingly cross in many accounts except for her “testing the strain in different mixes of nutrients to find the best one for producing the new antibiotic [streptomycin]." Even in Schatz's thesis, as a final note in his acknowledgments, he recognizes that a “few experiments [were] carried out in collaboration with Miss Elizabeth Bugie,” but he only included them “for the sake of completeness.”
However, during Waksman's manipulative guise to establish Schatz as an “assistant,” Schatz does admit that Bugie did contribute “to the best of [her] ability” to their work and later expressed that he did not know why Bugie was left off the patent. History will have to decide if Schatz was merely trying to get a piece of his contributions, or if he also consciously left out Bugie’s contribution to the discovery of streptomycin.
References
References
Pringle P. 2012. Experiment eleven: dark secrets behind the discovery of a wonder drug. Walker Publishing.
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