René Dubos, Friend of the Good Earth: Microbiologist, Medical Scientist, Environmentalist. Carol L. Moberg. ASM Press, Washington, DC. 2005. 260 pp. $29.95 (ISBN 1555813402 cloth).
Carol Moberg's authoritative and compassionate biography of René Dubos is an important and timely work. Dubos's two dozen books and nearly a thousand papers continue to shape our thinking about antibiotics, bacterial cells, medicine, and sustainability. His accomplishments and ideas are as profound as those of Louis Pasteur, Aldo Leopold, or Rachel Carson. Dubos demanded solutions to life's problems that went beyond science and technology to ecology, ethics, and the human search for meaning. His work is especially relevant today as we navigate through science wars and culture clashes. Dubos offers a compassionate, moderate, deliberative message to a world paralyzed by polarization.
Dubos was a successful experimental scientist, an insightful theorist, and a sought-after social critic and policy advisor. He succeeded brilliantly at bench science, as evidenced by his discovery of gramicidin, one of the first antibiotics. He also excelled at communication, having the ability to convey complex ideas to diverse audiences spanning many disciplines, as evidenced by his coining household phrases such as “Think globally, act locally” and winning the Pulitzer Prize for So Human an Animal (New York: Scribner, 1968). He brought an ecological orientation and an ethical obligation to his studies that produced new questions, new methods, new theories, and new directions for science and society.
Dubos's ecological approach to soil bacteria revealed complexities and interactions that explain how life functions at the basic, microbiological level. It also led him to issue early warnings about the now common problem of antibiotic resistance. His ecological approach to medicine focused on promoting health rather than curing disease. Infections and diseases become acute, he argued, because of environmental stresses, poor diet, emotional challenges, and other contextual factors—not just the presence of a bacterium or virus. Medicine now accepts Dubos's paradigm as dogma, but still struggles toward realizing his vision of a more holistic approach to health care.
His ecological orientation also forced Dubos to rethink the prevailing philosophy of science. He advocated a humanistic biology that went beyond reductionism and value-neutral facts to interconnected systems and contextual truths. He recognized that science and technology alone cannot solve societal problems. Solutions require philosophy, aesthetics, and ethics, and they must emerge from democracy and deliberation as well as technology. Perhaps most important, Dubos was a “despairing optimist” about environmental sustainability at a time when population bombs, mass extinction, and toxic wastes dominated a preventative, preservationist, misanthropic environmental movement. He believed humans were special and could be creative partners with nature in the odyssey of evolution.
Moberg is well qualified for the important task of capturing the nuances of Dubos's life. She assisted Dubos in the last decades of his career while he wrote his major works on the environment; she has a PhD in comparative literature from Columbia University; and she is on the faculty of Rockefeller University, where Dubos spent much of his professional life. She has access to his personal papers, rapport with his close peers, insight into his thinking, and sympathy for his philosophy.
The story is told, in part, using Dubos's own words and work. The reader is treated to a tour through the early 20th-century culture of science practiced at the Rockefeller Institute, the methods of microbiology and antibiotic research, the culture of medicine, the ecology of infection and disease, the biology of human nature, and the politics and philosophy of human ecology, environmentalism, and sustainability. Details abound, and the reader's appreciation for them may wax and wane depending on where the reader's interests overlap Dubos's broad reach. Insights also abound for readers engaged in one or more of the three main topics: microbiology, medicine, or environmentalism. But the book's appeal is broader still. René Dubos should be known by everyone who cherishes, celebrates, and hopes to sustain human life on earth.
