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death. But Domagk's drug could not kill all types of germs. Everywhere scientists searched for others. And in New Jersey, Selman Waksman looked in the throat of a chicken.
Selman Waksman was a scientist who studied dirt at Rutgers University. What Waksman found in the throat of the chicken was a microbe that usually lived in the soil. People had observed for years that a tuberculosis germ placed in soil did not live for very long. They began to suspect that perhaps one of the microbes that lived in the soil. People had observed for years that a tuberculosis germ placed in soil did not live for very long. They began to suspect that perhaps one of the microbes that lived in the dirt might kill tuberculosis germs. It made sense that in the tiny microbe world, just as among the larger creatures on the earth, there would be competition for space and food, and the microbes might be drawn into fightin one another. Perhaps some of the soil microbes had ways to kill tuberculosis that could even be used as a drug.
Selman Waksman had been studying soil microbes since the time he was in college. In the early thirties he did some experiments to see what he could learn about soil microbes and TB. He took some soil, treated it so all the microbes were killed, and then put some tuberculosis germs in it. Instead of quickly dying, as TB did in dirt with living microbes, the TB germs in the sterilized dirt lived happily. It seemed that some microbe was doing the killing. But it was not until years later that Waksman, working with a graduate student named Albert Schatz, was to find the bug that did it.
In the summer of 1943, a New Jersey farmer found that one of his chickens was having trouble breathing. Fearing a disease that might infect all his flock, the farmer brough the chicken in for testing at a laboratory that specialized in tracking agricultural diseases. One of Wakman's assistants was working in the lab that examined a swab from this chicken's throat. When he saw that one of the bugs found in the chicken's throat was on of Waksman's favorite soil microbes, Streptomyces, he saved the specimens for Waksman. Albert Schatz, the graduate student, had audaciously pledged to discover a cure for tuberculosis for his graduate research. He took the microbes, grew many more of them, and began to test all their excretions to see if one killed tuberculosis. In fact, one did. He name the drug made from this excretion after the microbes it came from.
In November of 1944, Patricia, a twenty-one year old woman who was dying of tuberculosis, was started on a course of stretomycin, and by the following April she was cured. Patricia, who would have died, went on to have three children. She could be your grandmother. For the thousands of people in sanatoriums waiting to die, it was a miracle, a true new lease on life. The bloody cough was no longer a death sentence.
Streptomycin was among the first of many microbial weapons to be sold as a drug. As we have seen, it was also an effective plague killer. These drugs produced by microbes became known as the antibiotics, and they turned the tables in the fight against infectious disease, for a while at least. In rapid succession, several more drugs were found that could fight tuberculosis. Patients greeted the discovery of these drugs by dancing in teh halls of the sanatoriums. The news was spectacular: those formerly too thin and weak to walk were up and wandering the halls; an old man who could hardly be forced to eat was now demanding eleven eggs for breakfast. In 1954, the Trudeau Sanatorium at Saranac was closed, an event that seemed to mean the end of an era, that tuberculosis would be no more. In the exhiliration, it was hard to pay attention to the uncomfortable truth that tuberculosis was not to be so easily defeated, that this disease had at least one more trick up its sleeve.