Science Tuesday - Streptomycin, TB, and Prometheus

Notebooks Shed Light on an Antibiotic’s Contested Discovery
By PETER PRINGLE, The New York Times, June 11, 2012

NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. — For as long as archivists at Rutgers University could remember, a small cardboard box marked with the letter W in black ink had sat unopened in a dusty corner of the special collections of the Alexander Library. Next to it were 60 sturdy archive boxes of papers, a legacy of the university’s most famous scientist: Selman A. Waksman, who won a Nobel Prize in 1952 for the discovery of streptomycin, the first antibiotic to cure tuberculosis.

The 60 boxes contained details of how streptomycin was found — and also of the murky story behind it, a vicious legal battle between Dr. Waksman and his graduate student Albert Schatz over who deserved credit.

Dr. Waksman died in 1973; after Dr. Schatz’s death in 2005, the papers were much in demand by researchers trying to piece together what really happened between the professor and his student. But nobody looked in the small cardboard box.

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China: Survey Reveals a Growing Number of Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis Cases
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr., The New York Times, June 11, 2012

China has a “serious epidemic of drug-resistant tuberculosis,” according to the first national survey of the disease, which was carried out by the Chinese Center for Disease Control and published last week in The New England Journal of Medicine.

Of the roughly 4,000 tuberculosis patients tested, a third of those with new cases and half of those with previously treated cases had drug-resistant disease.

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‘Prometheus’ Offers a Creationist Indulgence for Science Geeks
By JAMES GORMAN, The New York Times, June 10, 2012

“Prometheus,” the new movie from the director Ridley Scott, operates on several levels. Most importantly and impressively, it is an unforgettable reminder not to open anything, ever. Doors, caves, containers — never open them!

But it is also a scientific and spiritual quest. I don’t think it is spoiling anything to say that the scientists in the movie think somebody or something else created us.

Creationism? Yes, in a way, but creationism for geeks, of the sort that science fiction writers and scientists have long indulged in. It does not run counter to the idea of the process of evolution; it just sets the beginning of the whole business somewhere and some time other than the Earth.

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