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JAMA. 1999;282:1030.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

In 1943, Selman Abraham Waksman (July 22, 1888-August 16, 1973) led a team of Rutgers University researchers that isolated streptomycin, the first antibiotic effective against tuberculosis (TB) in humans. In 1952, Waksman received the Nobel Prize for this discovery.

Waksman grew up in the small Russian village of Novaya Priluka. In 1910, he settled in New Jersey, where a cousin operated a small farm. An interest in scientific farming brought him to nearby Rutgers College of Agriculture, where he earned a bachelor's degree in science in 1915 and a master's degree a year later. He completed his doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2 years, and returned to Rutgers to take a position as lecturer in soil microbiology.

Waksman preferred the term "microbiology" to the conventional "bacteriology" because "not the bacteria but the fungi and the actinomycetes formed my major interests among the microorganisms."¹ By the 1930s, he . . . [Full Text of this Article]

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