René Dubos, Friend of the Good Earth: Microbiologist, Medical Scientist, Environmentalist
Author: Carol L. Moberg1Category: History of Science; General Interest
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René Dubos, Friend of the Good Earth: Microbiologist, Medical Scientist, Environmentalist is a biography of one of the most influential scientists in recent history. Documenting his life from his birth in 1901 to his death in 1982, this book examines the intriguing career of Dubos and his tremendous impact on science, medicine, society, and the environment.
Dubos' science is presented in the context of 20th century biology, medicine, and ecology. The ecological approach that led to his discovery of the first antibiotic was the foundation for his career as a medical scientist and environmentalist. The issues he raised, including antibiotic resistance, the interrelatedness of environmental health to human health, and the potential danger of relying too heavily on vaccines and drugs to eradicate disease, continue to be provocative and increasingly relevant today. A prolific author and a passionate humanist, Dubos served as the conscience of the environmental movement and coined the popular motto “Think Globally, Act Locally.”
A balance of scientific and personal history, René Dubos, Friend of the Good Earth will engage a wide range of readers including biologists, medical scientists, bioethicists, physicians, ecologists, environmentalists, policymakers, historians, and general readers.
Hardcover, 260 pages, illustrations, index.
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Chapter 1 : Orchestral Relationships and Soil Microbes
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Abstract:
This chapter is the first of the biography that tells the story of how a bacteriologist’s quest for the mechanisms of disease turned into a philosopher’s search for the meaning of health. René Dubos, taking frequent refuge on his land that he gradually established living connections to the soil and found a lasting satisfaction from the hard physical work the land demanded. The land gave new strength to his science and writing. As trees grew, ideas matured and his transition from soil microbiologist to philosopher of earth became more inevitable and more assured. The chapter talks about his early childhood, discusses his career approach in soil science, and his entry in the new field of soil microbiology. Using direct techniques, Serge Winogradsky, one of the founders of soil microbiology, made three important discoveries: each type of soil contains an indigenous biota, each sample of soil harbors innumerable types of microbes, and many soil microorganisms could not be cultivated by any other means. Several qualities from his early work characterize Dubos’ approach to future research.
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Chapter 2 : Domesticating Microbes
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Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch discovered that microbes can cause many diseases, and this led to immediate practical applications for controlling diseases. The Rockefeller institute for medical research served as a “workshop of science” where scholars could develop knowledge of the nature and cause of disease as well as methods for prevention and treatment. The phenotypic expression of the bacteria was not the result of natural selection or genetic mutation but rather a biological adaptation leading to compromise and accommodation. The S III enzyme showed remarkable potential for curing type III pneumonia. The first trials using the enzyme involved testing it in mice as systemic therapy, that is, injecting it into circulating blood following intradermal infections that caused bacteremia or blood infections. Dubos turned from his studies on the S III enzyme of pneumococci to studies where he tried “to isolate new enzymes for other types of pathogenic microbes,” very likely one to attack the hemolytic streptococci. Serum therapy against pneumonia halted completely once penicillin became widely available in the 1940s. Dubos’ research in the development of antibiotics taught medical science the principles of finding and producing antibiotics and opened an interdisciplinary approach that drew on microbiology, chemistry, pharmacology, pathology, and medicine. Dubos’ discovery of the S III enzyme that dissolved the capsule further extended the reverse, reductionistic process of discovery.
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Chapter 3 : Tuberculosis and Dilemmas of Modern Medicine
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As early as 1942, Dubos warned that bacterial resistance to antibiotics should be expected. His prediction was based in large part on almost twenty years of research on bacterial responses to environmental factors. When Dubos wrote The Bacterial Cell he criticized germ theory bacteriologists for their “blind acceptance” of the doctrine of monomorphism because it had “discouraged for many years the study of the problems of morphology, inheritance, and variation in bacteria.” In a chapter devoted to bacterial variability, he discussed numerous investigations giving evidence that bacterial species vary in form, function, and chemical and antigenic composition. Bacterial transformations, he concluded, whether they are “permanent or transient—not only of a quantitative but often of a qualitative nature—appear in an unpredictable manner under conditions where the ‘purity’ of the culture cannot be doubted. Scientific discussions of antibiotics focused on the medical cures they produced. Incidents of resistance, when reported, were buried in medical scientific literature read by few laboratory scientists and fewer physicians. Scientists who predicted that tuberculosis could be eradicated were overlooking the fact that this goal depended not only on rigorous medical therapy but on a relentless endeavor of early detection, segregation, and education to prevent infection and halt the spread of the contagious pathogen. During the 1920s, pathologist James B. Murphy showed that when leukocytes are destroyed by radiation from X rays, the hosts become much more susceptible to tuberculosis. By 1951, Dubos decided that learning more about the biology of the tubercle bacillus was unproductive.
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Chapter 4 : Mirage of Health: Infection Infection versus Disease
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The Pasteur biography was a commercial success and assured Dubos’popularity as an author of many other books for the general public. On its publication in 1950, The New York Times called it “one of the best biographies of the year”. Inside the Rockefeller Institute, moreover, Dubos was encouraged to look beyond experimental evidence to learn how Pasteur visualized microbial life as integral to processes in health and disease. This work recalls Dubos's1934 experiments in Avery’s laboratory in which detrimental environmental factors lowered the physiological status of monkeys and made them susceptible to lobar pneumonia. The White Plague, the first of many books written in the orangery, is an unusual approach to medical history—a biography of a disease. The book was prompted largely by his growing concern that understanding tuberculosis was not a bacteriological problem but instead “a social pathology”. The Duboses are critical of twentieth-century medical science for being more successful in retarding death with vaccines, surgery, and drugs than for finding other ways to protect against infection. With his book Mirage of Health (1959), Dubos toppled two illusions: the quest for perfect health and the conquest of disease. With Mirage of Health, Dubos became the leading medical scientist to oppose the current popular belief that infectious diseases could be conquered.
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Chapter 5 : Toward a Science of Human Nature
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In 1962, Dubos published a pithy book titled The Torch of Life that was read by few and reviewed by no one. Dubos formed many “bricks” in this book from the knowledge he had accumulated during thirty years in scientific medicine. During the next two decades, he used and reused these “bricks” to structure many concepts that he believed would lead to a better understanding of human nature. Before the mid-1950s, many physicians believed that the stomach and small intestine contained only those bacteria ingested with food. By extension, the presence of bacteria, particularly the aerobic Escherichia coli and enterococci, meant there was infection or disease. Other important findings revealed that these microbes are acquired soon after birth and persist in constant numbers throughout an animal’s life, most of the bacteria are anaerobic, and areas previously assumed to contain mostly dead or pathogenic bacteria in fact normally harbor large populations of living organisms.
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Chapter 6 : Health as Creative Adaptation
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From the north-facing windows of his office in the Bronk Laboratory of The Rockefeller University, the elderly Dubos would become lost in thought as he gazed down on the sanctuary that framed his life as a scientist. Several prominent scientists became visible environmentalists during the 1970s, among them Margaret Mead, Linus Pauling, Paul Ehrlich, Barry Commoner, and Dubos. This was a time when scientists were beginning to come out from behind their laboratory benches, partly in response to a growing attitude that scientists were losing the confidence of the general public by not using their expertise on technical aspects of environmental issues. Dubos favored several alternatives to nuclear power and promoted using less energy from fossil fuels and more human energy; producing energy from renewable sources such as plants, wind, and thermal pools; and inventing unique regional solutions to energy needs. Dubos spent the final ten years of his life trying to relate human health to that of the whole earth. To call his idea of collective ecological well-being a theory or philosophy is too grand, especially for someone who consciously avoided giving names or labels to anything that might be construed as a big notion, a sweeping doctrine, or a philosophical system.
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Doody Enterprises
26 June 2013
At A Glance
Rene Dubos, Friend of the Good Earth: Microbiologist, Medical Scientist, Environmentalist is a biography of one of the most influential scientists in recent history. Documenting his life from his birth in 1901 to his death in 1982, this book examines the intriguing career of Dubos and his tremendous impact on science, medicine, society, and the environment. Dubos' science is presented in the context of 20th century biology, medicine, and ecology. The ecological approach that led to his discovery of the first antibiotic was the foundation for his career as a medical scientist and environmentalist. The issues he raised, including antibiotic resistance, the interrelatedness of environmental health to human health, and the potential danger of relying too heavily on vaccines and drugs to eradicate disease, continue to be provocative and increasingly relevant today. A prolific author and a passionate humanist, Dubos served as the conscience of the environmental movement and coined the popular motto "Think Globally, Act Locally." A balance of scientific and personal history, Rene Dubos, Friend of the Good Earth will engage a wide range of readers including biologists, medical scientists, bioethicists, physicians, ecologists, environmentalists, policymakers, historians, and general readers.
Description
This book is both a biography of the noted microbiologist and environmentalist Rene Dubos and an analysis and examination of the scientific methods behind his theories.
Purpose
The author discusses Dubos's personal life and his work, his journey from soil biology to medical research to environmental activist. As the medical community strives to deal with issues like emerging diseases (such as AIDS and Ebola), and problems like multidrug resistant infections, the book is an important contribution. The dangers of antibiotics were discussed by Dubos and his associates early in the research. This book demonstrates the medical community's responsibilities to understand not only the curative powers of new therapies, but also their long-term impact on the disease process in general.
Audience
Carol L. Moberg, a faculty member at Rockefeller University and an associate of Rene Dubos, has written this book with the general reader in mind. However, the depth of the research and the complexity of the subject make it an appropriate work for historians as well as clinicians.
Features
Using the major events in the life of Rene Dubos, the author shows how Dubos's life and work intersected. The book details his research in antibiotics, on tuberculosis, on infection vs. disease and host-disease relationships. He wrote extensively on a variety of subjects and became a key advocate for the environment. This work is able to combine biography of the individual with an analysis of the science of the day, as well as to examine Dubos's long-term contributions to science. The book is scrupulously researched, with an extensive notes section. Personal photographs allow the reader a glimpse at the individual. Appendixes provide a quick overview of the key events in Dubos's life, and a list of his own publications. Although some readers may find the details of the scientific work daunting, the author attempts to clarify the research process.
Assessment
I found this a fascinating and illuminating work on a scientist whose work has impacted the lives of all of us, and about whom not much as been written. This is a valuable asset to any collection on the history of medicine, as well as to collections that concern themselves with infectious diseases.
Doody Enterprises
Reviewer: Patricia Gallagher, MLS, MA, AHIP (New York Academy of Medicine)
Review Date: Unknown
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