The American microbiologist Selman Abraham Waksman (1888-1973) received the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for his discovery of streptomycin.

Selman Abraham Waksman was born on July 2, 1888 in Novaia-Priluka near Kiev in what is now the Ukraine. In 1908 he went to Odessa to study and garnered a matriculation diploma in 1910 from the Fifth Gymnasium in Odessa. He left almost immediately for the United States where he entered Rutgers College (now University) of Agriculture on a scholarship in 1911 and received a bachelor's degree in 1915. While completing work for a master's degree, awarded by Rutgers in 1916, he was a research assistant in soil bacteriology at the New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station.

On August 4, 1916, Waksman married Bertha Deborah Mitnik. That same year he became a citizen of the United States. He received a doctorate in biochemistry from the University of California in 1918. He returned to New Jersey as microbiologist at the...