“IF I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants,” Isaac Newton famously wrote.
Building on the work of others is an inherent part of the process of scientific discovery. But determining who gets the credit for each new development can be a convoluted and political process, shaped by entrenched notions of seniority and by aggressive self-promotion. For no man was this more painfully clear than the soil microbiologist Albert Schatz.
In 1943, while working as a PhD student in a basement lab at Rutgers University in New Jersey, the 23-year-old Schatz discovered a novel actinomycete…
