Finding Dr. Schatz: The Discovery of Streptomycin and a Life It Saved

Inge Auerbacher

Mar 2006 · iUniverse

About this eBook

As part of his doctoral research, Albert Schatz, a twenty-three-year-old graduate student at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, diligently worked alone in a basement laboratory to find an antibiotic to treat tuberculosis. In October of 1943, Schatz discovered streptomycin. But his professor, Selman Waksman, took the credit, relegating Schatz to the footnotes of history.

Over fifty years later, German-born Inge Auerbacher read an article that named Schatz as co-discoverer of the drug. As a young Jewish girl during World War II, Auerbacher was a prisoner at Terezin concentration camp in Czechoslovakia. She was diagnosed with tuberculosis during her imprisonment and was able to receive the life-saving streptomycin after her immigration to America.

Auerbacher contacted Schatz in 1997, compelled to offer him gratitude for the scientific research that saved her life. She learned of the controversy surrounding the discovery of streptomycin and Schatz's ultimate recognition for his work. As a result of their friendship, they decided to co-author this book.

Finding Dr. Schatz is their powerful true story-told in their own words-of a scientist who changed the world and a woman who lived because of it.

About the author

Albert Schatz was born in Norwich, Connecticut, in 1920. He died in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in January 2005 after a long career in research and teaching.

Inge Auerbacher was born in 1934 in Kippenheim, Germany. She is the author of I Am a Star-Child of the Holocaust, Beyond the Yellow Star to America, and Running Against the Wind.
www.ingeauerbacher.com