Selman Waksman
Biologist
Remembered for discovering Streptomycin (which was used to cure tuberculosis) and more than twenty other powerful antibiotics, this microbiologist and biochemist was the 1952 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. He taught at Rutgers University for close to forty years.
After earning bachelor's and master's degrees in agriculture from Rutgers University, he received a PhD in biochemistry from the University of California, Berkeley.
Using the money earned from his antibiotics patents, he established the Waksman Foundation for Microbiology.
Born in the Ukraine to a Jewish family, he relocated to the United States in his early adulthood years. His marriage to Deborah Mitnik resulted in one son, Multiple Sclerosis researcher Byron Waksman.
He and fellow Nobel Prize-winning scientist Alexander Fleming both discovered powerful antibiotics (Fleming was involved in the discovery of penicillin).