Rank, reinvention and the Nobel Prize Experiment Eleven Peter Pringle (Bloomsbury Publishing, London; 2012) ISBN 978-1-4008-1401-7

The story of streptomycin is no ordinary tale. On August 23rd, 1943, in an isolated basement room, a brave and determined graduate student, Albert Schatz, began his quest to cure tuberculosis. He, with his soil bacteria and virulent tubercle bacilli, was banished to that room by his supervisor Selman Waksman, who, like everyone else, dreaded the infection. Waksman never visited Schatz’s workroom. Schatz’s moment of discovery of an effective antibiotic was a key step in developing a treatment for tuberculosis; in the longer term streptomycin had to be combined with other drugs, but the antibiotic saved the lives and spared the suffering of millions. Streptomycin meant the end of innumerable sanatoria, institutions funded by misplaced hope and peopled by the forlorn [2]. Peter Pringle’s excellent book Experiment Eleven details how a simple discovery dominated and remodelled the lives of both these two scientists. It tells of a bitter legal fight over credit and a misallocated Nobel Prize. And, like the best of dramas, it reaches outwards, to illuminate scientific behaviour at the time, and forwards, to change our perceptions of scientific ethics today. Pringle has spent three years excavating clues from many sources, both personal and public; his search was helped by Milton Wainwright, who first reported extensively on the injustice done to Schatz [3]. Now Pringle, with the help of archivists at Rutgers University Libraries, Book review