René Jules Dubos (1901 – 1982)
French/American microbiologist, ecologist, and writer

Dubos, a French-born microbiologist, spent most of his career as a researcher and teacher at Rockefeller University in New York state. His pioneering work in microbiology, such as isolating the anti-bacterial substance gramicidin from a soil organism and showing the feasibility of obtaining germ-fighting drugs from microbes , led to the development of antibiotics.

Nevertheless, most people know Dubos as a writer. Dubos's books centered on how humans relate to their surroundings, books informed by what he described as "the main intellectual attitude that has governed all aspects of my professional life...to study things, from microbes to man, not per se but in their complex relationships." That pervasive intellectual stance, carried throughout his research and writing, reflected what Saturday Review called "one of the best-formed and best-integrated minds in contemporary civilization."

A related theme was Dubos's conviction that "the total environment" played a role in human disease. By total environment , he meant "the sum of the facts which are not only physical and social conditions but emotional conditions as well." Though not a medical doctor, he became an expert on disease, especially tuberculosis, and headed Rockefeller's clinical department on that disease for several years.

"Despairing optimism" also pervaded Dubos's human-environment writings, his own title for a column he wrote for The American Scholar, beginning in 1970. Time magazine even labeled him the "prophet of optimism:" "My life philosophy is based upon a faith in the immense resiliency of nature," he once commented.

Dubos held a lifelong belief that a constantly changing environment meant organisms, including humans, had to adapt constantly to keep up, survive, and prosper. But he worried that humans were too good at adapting, resulting in both his optimism and his despair: "Life in the technologized environment seems to prove that [humans] can become adapted to starless skies, treeless avenues, shapeless buildings, tasteless bread, joyless celebrations, spiritless pleasures—to a life without reverence for the past, love for the present, or poetical anticipations of the future." He stated that "the belief that we can manage the earth may be the ultimate expression of human conceit," but insisted that nature is not always right and even that humankind often improves on nature. As Thomas Berry suggested, "Dubos sought to reconcile the existing technological order and the planet's survival through the resilience of nature and changes in human consciousness."

[Gerald L. Young Ph.D. ]

RESOURCES

BOOKS

Piel, G., and O. Segerberg, eds. The World of Rene Dubos: A Collection from His Writings. New York: Henry Holt, 1990.

Ward, B., and R. Dubos. Only One Earth: The Care and Maintenance of a Small Planet. New York: Norton, 1972.

PERIODICALS

Culhane, J. "En Garde, Pessimists! Enter Rene Dubos." New York Times Magazine 121 (17 October 1971): 44–68.

Kostelanetz, R. "The Five Careers of Rene Dubos." Michigan Quarterly Review 19 (Spring 1980): 194–202.