René Dubos, Friend of the Good Earth: Microbiologist, Medical Scientist, Environmentalist

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.

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.

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.