Streptomycin: The Second Antibiotic in The History of Antibacterial Agents
المؤلف:
Ola Sköld, M.D., Ph.D
المصدر:
Antibiotics and Antibiotic Resistance
الجزء والصفحة:
p16-18
2025-07-13
393
The tremendous success of penicillin as an antibacterial agent isolated from a living organism induced an intensive search for further antibiotics among other microorganisms. Selman Waks man at Rutgers University was a well-known expert on soil microbes at the time (Fig. 1). Waksman was particularly interested in the antagonism between microorganisms as a means to understanding how soil microbes interact. It was said that one morning around 1940 he exclaimed to his collaborators: ‘‘Stop what you are doing. Look at what those English can do with a mold. I know that organisms in the soil can do a lot more—let’s start looking.’’ Waksman’s laboratory, among others, started the search for antibacterial agents among soil microorganisms. He and his co-workers concentrated their search on Actinomyces species and very soon found the two antibacterials actinomycin and streptothricin, which were, however, too toxic for use as antibacterial remedies. Actinomycin was toxic because it did not act selectively. Later it was put to good use as a cytostatic agent in the treatment of certain fast-growing forms of cancer, such as the epithelioma of the chorion, and streptothricin has been used for veterinary purposes in some parts of the world.
Fig1. Selman Waksman, discoverer of streptomycin. In this photograph note the burn hole in the elbow of the lab coat, which is often characteristic of microbiologists, caused by the small, easily overlooked ignition flame of a bunsen burner.
Further research by the group at Rutgers University resulted in the finding of streptomycin, which has been regarded as the second great antibiotic after penicillin. It had a dramatic medical impact because it was the first effective agent against Mycobacterium tuberculosis and thus the first effective remedy for tuberculosis, against which penicillin is not effective. The discovery was published in 1944 in Proceedings of the Society for Experimental Biology and Medicine in a paper, ‘‘Streptomycin: a Substance Exhibiting Antibiotic Activity Against Gram Positive and Gram-Negative Bacteria.’’ The first author of the paper was Albert Schatz, a graduate student of Waksman’s. He had isolated one of the streptomycin-producing strains of Streptomyces griseus and also tested the effect of this new antibiotic on different bacteria. He would, however, not have been able to do this without access to the expertise on soil microorganisms and the system of methods available in Waksman’s laboratory. The discovery of streptomycin was not at the time regarded as anything genuinely new in the scientific world, but as a development of concepts formulated in the breakthrough of penicillin as a medicine. Streptomycin won fame, however, as the first remedy against tuberculosis, and Waksman was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology in 1952. It was awarded to Waksman alone. Although Albert Schatz was responsible for the actual discovery, he was not included in the prize. This and the substantial amounts of royalty money that the commercial distribution of streptomycin as a pharmaceutical would bring in led to one of the bitterest feuds the world of science has ever seen. It continued for more than two decades, and included lawsuits, most of which Waksman won.
The protocols and regulations of the Nobel Committee at the Karolinska Institute are kept confidential for 50 years, so those regarding Waksman are now accessible for scrutiny. The streptomycin discovery, particularly with reference to the treatment of tuberculosis, was the subject of several reports and evaluations at that time. The most important one was dated August 21, 1952, and was signed by Einar Hammarsten, then professor and head of the Department of Medical and Physiological Chemistry at the Karolinska Institute. Hammarsten expressed himself very clearly, specifying that the discovery of streptomycin belonged to Waksmanalone. He argued that the first streptomycin-producing strain of S. griseus was isolated by Waksman and that he had worked out the procedure for the isolation of streptothricin, which was also used for the original purification of streptomycin. The most important early publications on streptomycin carry many young authors’ names, including Albert Schatz, Elisabeth Bugie, and Boyd Woodruff. Hammarsten wrote that these young co-workers could not be included as prizewinners.
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