Selman Waksman

Selman Abraham Waksman was a Russian-born American biochemist and microbiologist whose research into the decomposition of organisms that live in soil enabled the discovery of streptomycin and several other antibiotics, work for which he won the 1952 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. A professor of biochemistry and microbiology at Rutgers University for four decades, he introduced the modern sense of the word antibiotic and the procedures that led to the discovery of many others, and the proceeds from his patents funded the Waksman Institute of Microbiology at Rutgers. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/