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鈥淚F I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants,鈥� 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 bacterium. It would prove to be the source of the world鈥檚 first effective antibiotic treatment against tuberculosis.

In the ensuing decade, though, Schatz watched from the sidelines as his lab director, Selman Waksman, slowly took more and more credit for the breakthrough. Although it was Schatz who slogged long hours at great risk of TB exposure, in 1952 Waksman alone received the Nobel prize in physiology or medicine for the discovery of streptomycin.

鈥淪chatz watched from the sidelines as his lab director took more and more credit for the breakthrough鈥�

Experiment Eleven is a riveting and heartbreaking book, in which journalist Peter Pringle shows how, as many scientists have remarked, all too often 鈥渃redit goes to the man who convinces the world鈥�.