Selman Waksman — biochemist, microbiologist with roots in the Russian Empire
Selman Abraham Waksman was born on 22 July (10 July, Old Style) 1888 in Nova Pryluka, a small town in the Kiev Governorate of the Russian Empire, now in the Vinnytsia region of Ukraine, to Jacob Waksman, a merchant, and Fradia London. He studied at the local cheder, and in 1910 obtained his matriculation diploma from the Fifth Gymnasium in Odessa.
That year he emigrated to the United States, arriving in Philadelphia on 2 November 1910, where a relative welcomed him. With a scholarship he studied agriculture at Rutgers College in New Jersey, graduating in 1915 and taking a master's degree in 1916; he became an American citizen in 1915 and earned his doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1918.
He returned to Rutgers, becoming associate professor in 1924 or 1925 and professor in 1930, and specialised in soil microbiology, the decomposition of plant and animal remains and the microbial life of the sea. From 1939 he and his colleagues systematically studied how soil microorganisms affected other bacteria, screening more than ten thousand of them. He coined the word antibiotic for a substance produced by one microbe that inhibits or destroys others.
In 1943 his graduate student Albert Schatz isolated streptomycin from the soil bacterium Streptomyces griseus; it proved the first antibiotic effective against tuberculosis. Waksman's laboratory went on to find neomycin in 1948 and more than a dozen other antibiotic compounds. In 1952 he received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of streptomycin. The credit was contested: in 1950 Schatz sued Waksman and Rutgers over the credit and the royalties, and the case was settled out of court.
The patent was assigned to Rutgers, and royalties from it funded the university's Institute of Microbiology, which Waksman directed from its founding until 1958. He was made a knight of the Legion of Honour in 1950, served as president of the American Society for Microbiology, and published an autobiography, My Life with the Microbes, in 1954.
He died on 16 August 1973 at Hyannis, Massachusetts, aged eighty-five, and is buried in Woods Hole.
Tracing the roots — Nova Pryluka, Kiev Governorate (now Vinnytsia Oblast, Ukraine)
Born on 22 July 1888 in Nova Pryluka, Kiev Governorate, Russian Empire (now Ukraine), to Jacob Waksman and Fradia London, a Jewish family. He emigrated to the United States (sources give 1910 or 1911) and became a US citizen in 1916.
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Nova Pryluka, Kiev Governorate (now Vinnytsia Oblast, Ukraine). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.