The story of the lone heroic medical researcher who conquers a terrible disease is a cherished archetype: the long struggle, the countless unproductive experiments, the risk to the researcher, and above all that solitary, driven quest. We love this narrative so much that we will it into being, often at odds with the truth. One name, Alexander Fleming, will always be synonymous with penicillin, but for 13 years after Fleming discovered it, penicillin was going nowhere. The effective drug derived from that famous mould was developed under wartime pressure by a large team headed by Howard Florey and Ernst Chain. All three were rightly awarded the Nobel prize, but it doesn't matter how often I or anyone else says this, in the popular imagination the word penicillin will always conjure up Fleming and that stray contaminated Petri dish left on a lab bench.

But the story of penicillin is benign: Experiment Eleven tells the much darker saga of the second great antibiotic: streptomycin, the first to be effective against tuberculosis. Since editing pharmaceutical reference books many years ago, I had always believed that streptomycin was discovered by Selman Waksman. After all, hadn't he alone won the Nobel prize for this in 1952? Peter Pringle puts us right. In fact, streptomycin was discovered in 1943 by a postgraduate student, Albert Schatz (pictured), at Rutgers University, New Jersey, working under Waksman's direction but according to his own rationale for research. Schatz laboured around the clock, open to the risk of catching tuberculosis, in a basement laboratory, a place Waksman never visited. It took around 50 years for the public record to be set straight (although Schatz's exclusion from the Nobel prize could not be rectified), and the twists and turns and fabrications along the way make it as gripping as any thriller.

Waksman and Schatz were both from Jewish immigrant stock (Waksman himself came to America from Russia in 1910; Schatz was third generation, also from Russia) but they differed in crucial ways. Waksman's family was more bourgeois and in America he set about making both a name and money for himself in the land of opportunity. With streptomycin showing great promise against tuberculosis and other disease microorganisms, he quickly enlisted the support of Rutgers and negotiated a lucrative secret royalty deal with the major pharmaceutical company Merck, which made him instantly wealthy. Schatz, in contrast, only wished to work in his chosen field and to earn sufficient money to support his family. Having initially given Schatz equal credit on the first streptomycin paper and the patent, Waksman then froze him out. Schatz was led to believe that neither he nor Waksman would profit financially from the drug. To sideline Schatz, Waksman consistently promulgated a fictitious account of streptomycin's discovery involving an infected chicken (Schatz actually isolated the strain from a soil sample). Decades later, Schatz was able to joke: "I don't know what the normal lifespan of a chicken is, but this sick chicken has been alive for half a century."

This is not the first time the story has been told but it is the fullest account. Streptomycin opened the floodgates to a revolution in the treatment of infectious diseases, and led to the birth of big pharma – the giant pharmaceutical companies chasing lucrative patents and high profits. The consequences of this have included cartels and me-too drugs (drugs chemically modified not primarily for increased efficacy but simply to attain patentable status).

The story of the battle for credit in the discovery of streptomycin is Ecclesiastes in action: "The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happens to them all." And in this particular race the winner will probably turn out to be the TB bacillus. Human and natural timespans are tragically out of kilter. The antibiotic era is only 70 years old but the arms races of nature have been going on for billions of years and the crowing at the time – "killer diseases conquered" – now looks callow. In combination with other drugs, streptomycin has been remarkably successful for decades but it is no longer the frontline treatment. The resurgence of TB led the World Health Organization to declare a global health emergency in 1993. The microbiological battles described in this fine book will need to be fought again. One can only hope that the human ones will be conducted with more integrity. At the time of writing, the Rutgers website has an entry on Waksman as a distinguished alumnus but the name Schatz "did not match any inductees".

• Peter Forbes's Dazzled and Deceived: Mimicry and Camouflage is published by Yale.