Rene Jules Dubos Research Paper

Although many graduates of the INA pursued careers in scientific agricultural research, Dubos disliked laboratory work. Instead, he accepted a fellowship from the French government of Indochina to study at the Institut National d’Agronomie Coloniale, where he prepared for a position as a colonial administrator. However, the colonial government revoked its offer of employment at the conclusion of the training program when Dubos failed a physical examination. Having few alternatives, Dubos accepted an editorial position at l’Institut International d’Agriculture in Rome, where he abstracted technical articles for publication in the Journal of International Agricultural Intelligence. While in Rome, Dubos experienced a change of heart regarding his career plans. Inspired by an argument made in an article by the Russian agricultural bacteriologist, Sergei Winogradsky, Dubos reconsidered his decision to steer clear of laboratory research. In this research paper, Winogradsky encouraged his colleagues to reject pure culture techniques in favor of studies that more accurately monitored soil microbes in their natural environments. This more ecological approach to microbial investigation appealed to Dubos because it emphasized themes familiar to him from the training he had received as an agricultural engineer in Paris. Dubos gained the opportunity to study soil microbes himself when, at the 1924 International Congress of Soil Science, Jacob Lipman of the New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station invited the young Frenchman to study soil microbiology at his institution. Dubos accepted the offer, sailed to the USA, and spent the next three years in a doctoral program under the direction of Selman Waksman at Rutgers University and the New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station.

Soon after completing his Ph.D. in soil microbiology, Dubos received an unusual and compelling offer to join the research team of Oswald Avery, an immunochemist at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research. Few agricultural researchers received an opportunity to apply their skills to medical research in the 1920s, particularly at the nation’s most prestigious medical research institution, but Dubos’s doctoral research on cellulose decomposition filled a specific need in the Avery laboratory. For years, Avery’s laboratory group had tried unsuccessfully to strip the polysaccharide coating from the type III pneumococcus responsible for lobar pneumonia. Avery theorized that the coating protected the bacillus from the human body’s natural defenses. Dubos suggested that he could find a soil microbe with the ability to produce an enzyme capable of dissolving the polysaccharide coating. Avery gave the young agricultural scientist a chance.

Thus, in 1927, Rene Dubos began a nearly fifty-year association with the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (later Rockefeller University). Only a two-year stint as George Fabyan Professor of Comparative Pathology and Tropical Medicine at Harvard Medical School, 1942 to 1944, interrupted his career-long affiliation with the Rockefeller Institute. As a medical researcher, Dubos made numerous contributions to bacteriology and medical science. In the Avery laboratory group, he extracted an enzyme from a soil microbe that proved effective against the polysaccharide coating of the lobar pneumonia bacillus. Although the advent of sulfa drugs precluded the use of the Dubos enzyme in the clinical treatment of pneumonia, the process he used to extract the enzyme proved beneficial in the late 1930s, when he returned to the soil to find a microbe with broader bactericidal properties. In 1939 he earned international recognition by developing gramicidin, the first clinically useful antibiotic. His success suggested the clinical potential of soil microorganisms to researchers around the world. News of Dubos’s advances spurred Oxford University’s Howard Florey and Ernst Chain to resurrect Alexander Fleming’s long-dormant research on penicillin. Dubos’s work also inspired the effective development of streptomycin by his graduate school advisor, Selman Waksman. Collectively, these advances marked the beginning of the antibiotic era. Dubos’s leading role in antibiotics research earned him the status of full member at the Rockefeller Institute, and, in 1941, election to the National Academy of Sciences.

Although his advances in antibiotics research represented his most celebrated contributions to medical science, they were by no means his only accomplishments. In the late 1940s Dubos gained recognition as an outstanding tuberculosis researcher. With the assistance of Bernard Davis, he developed an effective culture medium for tuberculosis bacilli. This new Tween-albumin medium permitted researchers to study the difference between virulent and nonvirulent bacilli and was credited with catalyzing a ‘renaissance in tuberculosis research.’ A strong advocate for vaccination against tuberculosis, Dubos also established guidelines for the standardization of BCG vaccines worldwide. Finally, in the 1950s Dubos collaborated with physicians in the Rockefeller Hospital on a study which revealed that prolonged bed rest did not expedite the recovery of tuberculosis patients receiving antibiotic therapy. This discovery had profound implications for sanatoriums, the traditional sites for tuberculosis treatment.

Despite his path breaking contributions to the modern pharmacopoeia, Dubos is more often remembered for his provocative ideas on human health. No one contributed more to the hubris of medical science at mid-century than Dubos with his breakthroughs in antibiotics research, but shortly after unveiling gramicidin, he publicized his concerns about the adequacy of antibiotic therapy for handling infectious disease. As early as 1942 he warned that the unmitigated enthusiasm for antibiotic wonder drugs should be tempered by a concern that over-prescription of the drugs could lead to the development of more virulent, resistant bacterial strains. He argued that scientists gained an incomplete understanding of infectious disease when they focused solely on infectious agents. His studies of tuberculosis and the loss of his first wife to the disease taught him that, particularly in the case of latent infection, the host’s ability to resist a disease is at least as important as the presence of an infectious agent. Pathologic processes, in his opinion, depended upon the total environment of the host, and deserved the serious attention of scientists. This challenge to the specific etiology of disease contributed significantly to the formulation of current conceptions which now include social factors, mental and physical disturbances, and environmental conditions in the understanding and management of disease.

Dubos’s reconceptualization of disease, environment, and human health reached a broad audience of medical researchers, social scientists, politicians, and laypeople. He developed his ideas through over twenty books, countless articles in scholarly and popular journals, and an ever-increasing number of public addresses between the 1940s and the late 1970s. His most influential writings on human health include The White Plague: Tuberculosis, Man, and Society (1952), Mirage of Health: Utopias, Progress, and Biological Change (1987), and his Pulitzer-prize-winning text, So Human an Animal: How We are Shaped by Surroundings and Events (1998). In The White Plague, a book Dubos co-wrote with his second wife, Jean Porter Dubos, they mined historical accounts of tuberculosis outbreaks to demonstrate that the incidence of tuberculosis increased during times of social strife and decreased during less tumultuous eras. By linking it to poverty, they argued that tuberculosis was as much a social as well as a microbiological disease. In Mirage of Health, Dubos again challenged his readers to recognize disease as the indirect outcome of a constellation of circumstances rather than the direct result of a virulent microorganism.

Microbial disease, when it occurred, was due to an imbalance in the host’s equilibrium caused by any of a number of factors in the external or internal environment—be it weather conditions, availability of food, working habits, emotional status, or emotional stress. Therefore, he argued, by ameliorating social and environmental conditions, social reformers had been more effective than scientists in reducing mankind’s susceptibility to disease. Disease, according to Dubos, could not be eradicated simply by medical treatment. Social conditions must also be managed. His message enjoyed broad appeal among social scientists, many of whom, like Dubos, refocused their scholarly inquiries toward research that revealed how changes in an organism’s social environment affected its health. Scientists also utilized Dubos’s biopsychosocial perspective on health to construct a theoretical justification for the study of psychosomatic medicine.

By the 1970s, Dubos had become one of the USA’s most visible scientists. His message appealed to a large number of Americans interested in the increasingly apparent connection between the environment and human health. Although organizations invited Dubos to speak on the environmental aspects of health and disease as early as the 1950s, his influence among environmentalists grew substantially after the publication of his Pulitzer-prize-winning book, So Human an Animal, in 1998. The book appeared when the USA was in the midst of the largest grassroots environmental movement in its history. Humans, like soil microbes, argued Dubos, adapt to their changing environments. Therefore, the quality of the environment in which a human develops holds great significance in the determination of human health and well-being. Although some environmentalists took issue with Dubos’ notion that humans could improve on nature, many embraced him as an elder statesman of their movement. They adopted several of his maxims, including ‘Think globally, but act locally’ and ‘Trend is not destiny,’ as rallying cries for their cause. Dubos remained active in environmental activities years after his 1971 retirement from Rockefeller University. He co-wrote Only One Earth with economist and political scientist, Barbara Ward. This document provided scientific and social guidelines for the First UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm in 1972. In 1977, Dubos lent his name to the New York-based Rene Dubos Center for Human Environments, an organization charged with the planning of international forums to promote beneficial human interventions into nature.

Dubos traveled an uncommon path from his early days as a French agricultural engineer to his respected position within the Rockefeller University and twentieth-century biomedical research. Although recognized and applauded as part of the scientific establishment by the 1940s, Dubos never hesitated to challenge the methodologies of his colleagues. Because he believed that all living organisms must be understood in the context of their respective environments, he advocated less reductionistic laboratory research, studies that traversed interdisciplinary boundaries, and an ecological understanding of disease. He followed his inner logic outside the confines of scientific safety, where he found diverse and interested audiences willing to engage his provocative message. Rene Dubos died on his 81st birthday in New York City.

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