Soil Quality Lab -- InSitu Soil Ecosystem Interrogation
The Soil Environment Drives The Soil Quality Laboratory
NOT the other way around … in other words, we don’t take samples from the field back into the lab, we construct the lab to be operational in the living ecosystems of the field OR in the living ecosystems of the composting material in-process … the point of soil quality laboratory is NOT to replace existing soil testing labs, but to provide a new kind of technologies that directly interrogate living ecosystems of the soil and compost with a minimum of disturbance or measurement error induced by just taking measurements.
Selman Waksman’s Seven Grand Questions on Soil Microbiology
Selman Waksman, a biochemist and soil microbiologist whose research into the decomposition of organisms that live in soil, co-discovered streptomycin along with Albert Schatz and Elizabeth Bugie. Waksman’s team in the Rutgers Department of Biochemistry and Microbiology. discovered several antibiotics, including actinomycin, clavacin, streptothricin, streptomycin, grisein, neomycin, fradicin, candicidin, candidin. Streptomycin was the first effective drug against gram-negative bacteria and the first antibiotic used to cure tuberculosis. In 1952, Waksman was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for “ingenious, systematic, and successful studies of the soil microbes that led to the discovery of streptomycin.” {NOTE: There are indeed controversies about exactly WHO deserves what share of the credit for the discovery of streptomycin, but there is NO controversy whatsoever that this work happened in Waksman’s lab and that the members of lab developed and refined the procedures for the ingenious, systematic, and successful studies of the soil microbes.}
It is precisely that ingenious, systematic, and successful studies of the soil microbes that we are interested in carrying forward with Soil Quality Laboratory. Although Waksman’s research was more general and far reaching because his lab also examined the role of bacteria in marine systems, with a particular focus on the role of bacteria in nutrient cycles, we are particularly interested in SOIL science and especially SOIL microbiology … which is why we are still very much interested in the Seven Grand Questions that Waksman posed in his 1927 book, Principles of Soil Microbiology