On October 19, 1943 C.E., a 23-year-old PhD student working in a basement laboratory at Rutgers University pulled a sample from a soil culture and changed the course of medicine. Albert Schatz had just isolated streptomycin — the first antibiotic capable of killing the bacterium behind tuberculosis, a disease that had claimed more human lives than almost any other in recorded history.
Key findings
- Streptomycin isolation: Schatz extracted the compound from Streptomyces griseus, a soil-dwelling microorganism, in October 1943 C.E. — the first antibiotic shown to be active against tuberculosis.
- Tuberculosis treatment: Before streptomycin, TB had no reliable cure; it killed roughly one in seven people in industrialized nations throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries C.E.
- Randomized clinical trial: The first randomized trial of streptomycin against pulmonary TB, conducted from 1946 to 1948 C.E. by the U.K.’s Medical Research Council, is now widely recognized as one of the first randomized curative trials in the history of medicine.
A cure born in the soil
Tuberculosis is ancient. Evidence of the disease appears in Egyptian mummies and in bones from Neolithic Europe. For millennia, it killed quietly and steadily — in the lungs, the spine, the lymph nodes — and medicine had almost nothing to offer in return.
That changed when scientists began looking seriously at soil microbes. Selman Waksman, Schatz’s doctoral supervisor at Rutgers University, had spent decades studying actinomycetes — a group of bacteria found in soil that naturally produce compounds lethal to other microbes. His lab had already identified several such compounds, though none effective against TB. Schatz, working with urgency and little funding, screened hundreds of cultures before isolating Streptomyces griseus and extracting streptomycin from it.
The Rutgers team published their findings in January 1944 C.E. Within months, they were collaborating with researchers at the Mayo Clinic to begin animal trials. A study using just 10 grams of the scarce drug in guinea pigs demonstrated survival — enough to convince Merck & Co. to redirect resources toward commercial production.
How streptomycin works
Streptomycin belongs to a class of antibiotics called aminoglycosides. It works by binding irreversibly to the 30S ribosomal subunit of bacterial cells — essentially jamming the machinery bacteria use to manufacture proteins. Without functioning protein synthesis, the cell cannot survive.
At low concentrations, streptomycin targets bacterial ribosomes without fatally disrupting human cells, though the margin is narrow enough that side effects — particularly hearing loss and kidney toxicity — are real risks. Those risks were accepted, in the 1940s C.E., as vastly preferable to TB’s near-certain death sentence.
The World Health Organization now lists streptomycin as an essential medicine and classifies it as critically important for human medicine — recognition that its core function remains relevant even in an era of far newer drugs.
Lasting impact
The isolation of streptomycin did more than cure TB. It proved that antibiotics were not a one-off phenomenon — that the natural world contained a vast pharmacopeia waiting to be found in soil, in fungi, in the microbial communities beneath our feet. The search for new antibiotics intensified, and the discipline of soil microbiology gained new urgency and prestige.
The Medical Research Council’s streptomycin trial of 1946–1948 C.E. also left a methodological legacy as significant as the drug itself. Its use of random allocation to treatment and control groups helped establish the randomized controlled trial as the gold standard of medical evidence — a framework that now underlies virtually all clinical medicine.
Robert Dole, who later served as U.S. Senate Majority Leader and ran for president, was the third patient treated with streptomycin at a military hospital in Battle Creek, Michigan, in March 1946 C.E. He experienced what the historical record describes as a rapid and robust recovery — a detail that grounds this milestone in individual human lives, not just statistics.
TB mortality fell dramatically in the decades that followed. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tracks ongoing progress in TB elimination, a goal that streptomycin made conceivable for the first time in human history.
Blindspots and limits
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded in 1952 C.E. to Selman Waksman alone — a decision that erased Schatz’s name from history for decades. Schatz sued for recognition and a share of the royalties; he eventually received 3% and back compensation, but the Nobel committee never revisited the award. Elizabeth Bugie, who contributed meaningfully to the lab’s work on antimicrobials and co-authored the original paper, was not listed on the patent and received a 0.2% royalty share — a reminder that scientific credit has rarely been distributed equitably, particularly for women researchers.
Streptomycin also came with a problem built into its success: bacterial resistance. Early clinical trials showed that Mycobacterium tuberculosis could develop resistance to the drug, particularly when it was used alone. That finding drove the development of combination therapy — using multiple drugs simultaneously — which remains the cornerstone of TB treatment today. TB still kills more than a million people each year globally, and drug-resistant strains pose a serious ongoing threat.
Read more
For more on this story, see: Wikipedia — Streptomycin
For more from Good News for Humankind, see:
- Alzheimer’s risk cut in half by drug in landmark prevention trial
- U.K. cancer death rates down to their lowest level on record
- The Good News for Humankind archive on the modern era
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