Medicine: Team Trouble
Like most scientific discoveries of modern times, streptomycin was found as a result of teamwork. Members of the 1943 team working on antibiotics in the Department of Microbiology at New Jersey's Rutgers University were Dr. Selman A. Waksman, head of the department, and a group of graduate students including Albert Schatz. By 1946, when Schatz left the campus, it was still not clear how rich a gold mine streptomycin would prove to be.
Then streptomycin royalties reached almost $1,000,000 a year (TIME, Nov. 7). Waksman assigned his patents to the Rutgers Research and Endowment Foundation. So did Dr. Schatz. But last week, in New Jersey superior court, Albert Schatz, now assistant professor of biology at Brooklyn College, filed suit for a half of Rutgers' profits, said he had signed away his royalties under coercion.
Said Russell Watson, attorney for Waksman and Rutgers: "Baseless and preposterous . . . Dr. Schatz's work . . . was performed as a carefully supervised laboratory assistant."
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