At first glance it seems almost miraculous that an ill- funded academic laboratory at a university without a medical school, led by a man without a medical degree, would succeed where better-funded and better-credentialed groups had failed. But the story of streptomycin's discovery is the story of university-industry cooperation at its best. It's a paradigm that federal officials and health-care reformers would do well to consider seriously in approaching such present-day scourges as AIDS.
One obvious lesson from Waksman and Schatz's achievement is the potentially enormous value of basic research that moves in unconventional directions. Waksman's laboratory was in an agricultural school, and his students were concerned with soil microbiology, a subject that few legislators, journalists, or even other scientists would readily connect to a cure for tuberculosis. But the dean of Rutgers' College of Agriculture encouraged his work, and support for it came from a grant provided by Merck ...
