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

This biography is the capstone to Carol Moberg's abiding interest in René Dubos. Drawing on her uniquely close relationship to him and his family, she offers the first comprehensive story of his life and work. In six chapters, she explores his career, stressing its ecological significance. There are two stories here: Dubos's progression from naive and sickly boy to worldly and influential scientist, and his steady ecological perspective across his research.

In chapter 1, "Orchestral Relationships and Soil Microbes," Moberg describes Dubos's entry into the scientific world, highlighting the influence of the Russian microbiologist Sergei Winogradsky, whose ecological methods in soil microbiology inspired Dubos to study in that field. This is a crucial moment in Dubos's developing approach to science—one that informs almost all aspects of his subsequent career. Moberg succeeds in revealing the essentials of this episode, but fails to capture the complexities involved in the daunting task of tracking influences between scientists. Readers would have benefited from a closer comparison of the research conducted in the 1930s–1940s by Winogradsky, Dubos, and Selman Waksman (who played a greater role in Dubos's education than she allows). This criticism applies to all of Moberg's discussions of Dubos's laboratory research.

In chapter 2, "Domesticating Microbes," Moberg wonderfully depicts Dubos's transition from soil science at Rutgers to medical research with Oswald Avery at the Rockefeller Institute. She balances nicely Dubos's path to discovering the first antibiotic, his acclimatization to American society, his first marriage, and the brutal loss of his wife to tuberculosis, all in the shadow of his own dark secret of rheumatic fever and told in Moberg's sensitive yet authoritative voice. In chapter 3, "Tuberculosis and Dilemmas of Modern Medicine," she describes Dubos's return to the Rockefeller Institute, where he investigated tuberculosis and bacterial resistance to antibiotics. Regrettably, she dismisses his Harvard years. A closer reading of this period would reveal the influence of his colleagues there—for example, that of Frank MacFarlane Burnet, whose ecological perspective on immunology clearly at least strengthened Dubos's own developing views. A clue here is that Dubos based his first major book, The Bacterial Cell, on the lectures he gave at Harvard. In chapter 4, "Mirage of Health: Infection versus Disease," Moberg takes Dubos through the writing of a Pasteur biography, The White Plague, and Mirage of Health. She covers his multifaceted—that is, ecological—research on the relationship of infection and disease, showing how holistic problems of bacterial interactions led him to environmentalism.

Chapter 5, "Towards a Science of Human Nature," covers the final stage of Dubos's implementation of an environmental and ecological approach to medicine and the incorporation of his innovative work in medical education, policy debates, and social reforms. In chapter 6, "Health as Creative Adaptation," Dubos quietly removes himself from active research, but speaks more aggressively in the public sphere where he promoted the idiosyncratic yet profound perspective of despairing optimism.

It is surprising that Moberg only rarely engages literature in the history of science and history of medicine—two extremely relevant areas of scholarship that would have helped situate her biography. I suggest that historians read her acknowledgments at the end of the volume first, which help explain the frustrating gaps they will encounter in her story. Dubos regularly purged his correspondence and laboratory notebooks, and did not keep diaries—tools essential for connecting the two sides of her interpretation, his published laboratory findings and his overt personal and public activities.

Moberg's sensitive and timely biography compels one to revisit René Dubos's writings. Inspiration awaits the medical practitioners, historians, and especially the broad public in whom he saw the salvation of human destiny.