Selman Waksman

SELMAN WAKSMAN d1973. Jewish Russian Empire-born American inventor, biochemist and microbiologist whose research into the decomposition of organisms that live in soil enabled the discovery of streptomycin and several other antibiotics. A professor of biochemistry and microbiology at Rutgers University for four decades, he discovered a number of antibiotics (and introduced the modern sense of that word to name them), and he introduced procedures that have led to the development of many others. In 1952, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for "ingenious, systematic and successful studies of the soil microbes that led to the discovery of streptomycin"