476 Second European Journey 



teriologists; and his continued interest in Smith's work was shown 

 by a letter of 1912 praising one of his papers on crown gall, " On 

 some resemblances of Crown-gall to Human Cancer." 



During recent decades, microbiology and its branches of science, 

 have been greatly expanded and become far more specialized. 

 In 1947, at Copenhagen, a fourth International Congress for 

 Microbiology was held, attended by more than eleven hundred 

 persons, eighty-seven of whom were Americans representing var- 

 ious segments of study. Recently at Rutgers University was estab- 

 lished an institute," an outgrowth of a department, of micro- 

 biology under the brilliant leadership of Dr. Selman A. Waksman, 

 a former student of Dr. Halsted. At the Copenhagen congress 

 Waksman was the first American scientist to receive the Emil 

 Christian Hansen prize for microbiology.'' His most famous dis- 

 covery has been the antibiotic, streptomycin. Since then, among 

 other discoveries of importance, there have been two which 

 approximate in value and, as remedies against several serious 

 diseases, may prove of comparable worth with the first great 

 antibiotic, penicillin, and with streptomycin. Aureomycin,'^ now 

 introduced into medical practice, was discovered by B. M. Duggar, 

 emeritus member of the faculty of the University of Wisconsin. 

 Chloromycetin, the utilization of which is now being investigated, 

 was the original discovery of Paul R. Burkholder of the Osborn 

 Botanical Laboratory, Yale University. He isolated the Strepto- 

 myces species from a soil sample collected in Venezuela." 



Dr. Smith, while on his European journey of 1913, was interested 

 in microbiology, but mainly those aspects which pertained to the 

 study of plant diseases. Not until 1915 would the English bac- 

 teriologist, Frederick William Twort, announce in the Lancet his 

 discovery of the bacteriophage. This, as a product of the bacterial 

 cell, was a decade and more later to figure in studies of cancer 

 viruses," and assistants in Smith's laboratory would publish on 

 the influence of bacteriophage on Bacterium tumejaciens}^ In 



^* S. A. Waksman, An institute of microbiology — its aims and purposes, Science 

 110(2845): 27-30, July 8, 1949. Six main research fields described. 

 "5f/V«fe 106(2734): 339, Oct. 10, 1947. 

 ''"Science 110: 305, Sept. 23, 1949. 

 ^^ Science 106(2757): 417, 418, Oct. 31, 1947. 

 ^^ British Medical Journal, London, 515, March 26, 1949. 

 ^* N. A. Brown and A. J. Quirk, Influence of bacteriophage on Bacterium tume- 



