By Henry North, Ph.D.
Harold Boyd Woodruff was born in Bridgeton, N.J., to a farming family. During the depression, his father had to resort to sharecrop farming, moving from one sharecrop farm to another. Finally, the family left farming and moved to Buffalo, N.Y. However, his mother couldn’t take the Buffalo winters and suffered infections every winter. There being no antibiotics at that time, under doctor’s orders, the family returned to N.J. to farm again.
On the farm, a county agricultural agent taught Woodruff how to vaccinate chickens, among other things. The agent influenced him to attend Rutgers University and “made sure that a lot of things happened that really brought me to Rutgers.”1 Woodruff graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Rutgers with a bachelor’s degree in soil chemistry in 1939. He later earned a doctorate in microbiology under Selman A. Waksman, Ph.D., who taught soil microbiology, at the New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station (now the Rutgers School of Environmental and Biological Sciences).
Under Waksman, Woodruff began working with antibiotics. Woodruff wrote in the Annual Review of Microbiology, “For the first time, I realized the unity of biology and chemistry, that each biological observation has an underlying chemical cause, that in unraveling the latter, one could understand the other.”2
Inspired by Alexander Fleming’s experiments with penicillin and research by a former Rutgers graduate student, René Dubos of the Rockefeller Institute, Waksman encouraged Woodruff to investigate whether actinomycetes, threadlike bacteria found in the soil, could produce what would become known as an antibiotic. Woodruff was able to isolate two microbes, culture them, and purify the antibiotics they produced: first actinomycin, which he found could inhibit tuberculosis, and later streptothricin, which was used to treat tuberculosis, typhoid, plague, and other diseases that did not respond to penicillin and other drugs.
Douglas E. Eveleigh, Ph.D., a professor emeritus of biochemistry and microbiology at Rutgers University, said that Woodruff’s research “was the eureka moment in all antibiotic discovery. The pharmaceutical industry caught on very rapidly, and there followed an avalanche of antibiotics. This was all dependent on the Woodruff proof of concept in screening for antibiotic production.”2
In the 1940s, when Merck & Co. decided to expand from making chemicals to working with microbes, they approached Waksman, who set up a project that Woodruff would work on. It ultimately led to Woodruff leaving Rutgers to join Merck & Co., where he oversaw the introduction of other antibiotics; vitamins B12, C, and riboflavin; a treatment for a rare cancer called Wilms tumor; a pneumonia vaccine; and a drug used to treat river blindness.
In 1952, Waksman won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for his discovery of streptomycin, the first antibiotic effective against tuberculosis."3 Woodruff wrote a biography of Waksman for Applied and Environmental Microbiology.
Woodruff received 2 percent of the royalties from streptomycin, which he later used to endow an undergraduate scholarship fund and a microbiology graduate fellowship in soils and environmental biology at Rutgers.
At Merck, Woodruff was on the team that perfected the first commercial mass production of penicillin during World War II. He was later the executive director for biological sciences and executive administrator for Merck Sharp & Dohme Research Laboratories in Japan. He was also the founding editor of the Journal of Applied Microbiology.
Woodruff died in his home in Watchung, N.J., on January 19, 2017, at the age of 99.
Henry North, Ph.D. is coeditor of the AAPS DDDI newsletter and assistant professor of pharmaceutical sciences in the College of Pharmacy at Harding University in Searcy, Arkansas.
- Interview with H. Boyd Woodruff, Rutgers Oral History Archives, Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences. Accessed March 2, 2017.
- Roberts S. H. Boyd Woodruff, Microbiologist Who Paved Way for Antibiotics, Dies at 99. The New York Times. Published February 3, 2017.
- The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1952. Nobel Prize website. Accessed March 2, 2017.