The Waksman Institute of Microbiology is a research facility on the
Busch Campus
Busch Campus is one of the five sub-campuses at Rutgers University's New Brunswick/Piscataway area campus, and is located entirely within Piscataway, New Jersey, US. Academic facilities and departments centered on this campus are primarily those r ...
of
Rutgers University
Rutgers University (; RU), officially Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, is a public land-grant research university consisting of four campuses in New Jersey. Chartered in 1766, Rutgers was originally called Queen's College, and was ...
. It is named after
Selman Waksman
Selman Abraham Waksman (July 22, 1888 – August 16, 1973) was a Jewish Russian-born American inventor, Nobel Prize laureate, biochemist and microbiologist whose research into the decomposition of organisms that live in soil enabled the discover ...
, a student and then faculty member at Rutgers who won the
Nobel Prize for Medicine
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine is awarded yearly by the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute for outstanding discoveries in physiology or medicine. The Nobel Prize is not a single prize, but five separate prizes that, according ...
in 1952 for research which led to the discovery of
streptomycin
Streptomycin is an antibiotic medication used to treat a number of bacterial infections, including tuberculosis, ''Mycobacterium avium'' complex, endocarditis, brucellosis, ''Burkholderia'' infection, plague, tularemia, and rat bite fever. F ...
. The institute conducts research on microbial
molecular genetics
Molecular genetics is a sub-field of biology that addresses how differences in the structures or expression of DNA molecules manifests as variation among organisms. Molecular genetics often applies an "investigative approach" to determine the ...
, developmental molecular genetics, plant molecular genetics, and structural and
computational biology.
In 2019, Dr.
Kenneth D. Irvine was appointed as Interim Director of the Waksman Institute. Dr. Irvine has been a member of the Waksman Institute since 1995 and is currently a Distinguished Professor of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry and Director of the Rutgers Graduate Program in Cell and Developmental Biology. He was selected by his peers after the untimely passing of the Institute's fourth director,
Joachim Messing.
History
A total of eighteen antibiotics were isolated in Waksman's laboratory at the New Jersey Agriculture Experimental Station at Rutgers University. Of these,
streptomycin
Streptomycin is an antibiotic medication used to treat a number of bacterial infections, including tuberculosis, ''Mycobacterium avium'' complex, endocarditis, brucellosis, ''Burkholderia'' infection, plague, tularemia, and rat bite fever. F ...
and
neomycin
Neomycin is an aminoglycoside antibiotic that displays bactericidal activity against gram-negative aerobic bacilli and some anaerobic bacilli where resistance has not yet arisen. It is generally not effective against gram-positive bacilli and ...
, and
actinomycin
Dactinomycin, also known as actinomycin D, is a chemotherapy medication used to treat a number of types of cancer. This includes Wilms tumor, rhabdomyosarcoma, Ewing's sarcoma, trophoblastic neoplasm, testicular cancer, and certain types of ovari ...
were commercialized. Streptomycin, in particular, was the first antibiotic to cure
tuberculosis
Tuberculosis (TB) is an infectious disease usually caused by '' Mycobacterium tuberculosis'' (MTB) bacteria. Tuberculosis generally affects the lungs, but it can also affect other parts of the body. Most infections show no symptoms, i ...
. Waksman used half of his personal royalties from patents for streptomycin to create the Foundation for Microbiology in 1951. The Foundation is a private organization that funds and supports microbiology research.
He requested money from the Foundation to create the Institute of Microbiology at Rutgers. The idea for an institute that focused on
soil science
Soil science is the study of soil as a natural resource on the surface of the Earth including soil formation, classification and mapping; physical, chemical, biological, and fertility properties of soils; and these properties in relation to th ...
first came from Waksman's mentor, Dr. Jacob Lipman, who taught Waksman when he was an undergraduate student and later became his colleague. The institute was founded in on June 7, 1954 with Waksman as its first director. He retired in 1958.
Directors of the Waksman Institute of Microbiology
(founder, 1954 - 1958)
Jay Oliver Lampen (1958 - 1980)
David Pramer (1980 - 1988)
Joachim Messing (1988 - 2019)
References
External links
Official page
Further reading
*
{{Rutgers
Rutgers University