Streptomycin was isolated at Rutgers University on October 19, 1943. It was the first antibiotic that could fight tuberculosis, a disease that had killed millions and had no real cure. The discovery came from dirt.
Selman Waksman led the laboratory, and a graduate student named Albert Schatz found the organism. He pulled a bacterium called Streptomyces griseus from soil and showed that it killed the tuberculosis germ in a test. The work was done under Waksman, and the credit was later fought over.
The drug changed tuberculosis. Before it, treatment meant rest, fresh air, and hope, and the disease often won. Streptomycin could actually stop the bacteria, though it had to be used with other drugs to prevent resistance. The sanatoriums began to empty.
The discovery ran in a line from penicillin, found fifteen years earlier by Fleming. Penicillin worked on many infections but not on tuberculosis, and the search for something that could was a deliberate project. Soil was the place to look, because soil is full of competing microbes.
Streptomycin was the first of a family of drugs, a group that would grow into the workhorse medicines used to treat infections for the next fifty years. It opened the age of antibiotics taken from the earth, and it saved a vast number of lives. Waksman received the Nobel Prize in 1952, and Schatz's role is now recorded. The dirt had delivered.