Credit where credit is due

A new book by Morton A Meyers* highlights the problem faced by inventors and scientists in an organisation where a superior takes the credit for a breakthrough.

Perhaps most shocking is the case of Albert Schatz, the discoverer of the revolutionary drug Streptomycin. A graduate student at Rutgers University in New Jersey, he started searching in soil samples for micro-organisms that might combat tuberculosis, one of the great plagues of recent centuries.

After hundreds of experiments, on 19 October 1943 Schatz “realized I had a new antibiotic… I felt elated, and very tired.” Sadly for him, his boss at Rutgers, Selman Waxman, saw it quite differently. Waxman had approved Schatz’s work, and this seemed to him to be enough to claim the credit. In due course it was Waxman who won the Nobel Prize, not to mention having benefited from continuous income from royalties.

Schatz spent the rest of his life endeavouring to set the record straight. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of lives have been saved by Streptomycin.

The basic problem is exacerbated by the tendency present in all organisations – corporations, professional, governmental or academic – to believe and support the senior figure.

*Morton A Meyers, Prize Fight: The Race and the Rivalry to be First in Science, Palgrave Macmillan

Invictus and personal responsibility

It’s at this time that many of us make new commitments and plans for the coming year. I’ve no doubt that WE Henley’s poem, “Invictus”, helped me to retrieve and take responsibility for my own life and work in the late 1980s.

Up to that time, it seemed to me that I was owned lock, stock and barrel by whichever advertising agency employed me. Everything seemed so urgent and important at work that I sacrificed many other important aspects of life, not least family. And I didn’t realise then that the advertising business has a memory lasting something less than a nanosecond.

Henley (above, bust by Rodin) had a difficult, extremely painful childhood. He caught tuberculosis of the bone as a twelve year-old and his life was saved by the pioneering surgeon, Joseph Lister, at the Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh with the amputation of his leg at twenty-six in 1875. There he wrote the poem, convalescing in that hospital and also meeting Robert Louis Stevenson for the first time. (Henley was the inspiration behind the character Long John Silver in Stevenson’s Treasure Island.)

A century later, imprisoned on Robben Island, Nelson Mandela read the poem aloud to other inmates.

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

I wonder if it speaks to you?