Time, and the great healer | Education | The Guardian: But Waksman was not, in fact, the man who discovered streptomycin. The antibiotic was isolated by his postgraduate student Albert Schatz, an intense, skinny 23-year-old who worked in a basement lab three floors below Waksman's office at Rutgers University, New Jersey. While the professor collected prizes and honours, his student sank into scientific obscurity, consumed by a sense of injustice.
The story of streptomycin - of scientific triumphs, all-too-human scientists and a long quest for justice - lies somewhere between these two men. But until 1990, when a British scientist launched a campaign to rehabilitate Schatz, history credited one man alone: Waksman.