DUBOS, RENÉ

René Jules Dubos (1901–1982), the French-American microbiologist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author, was born in Saint-Brice-sous-Forêt, France, on February 20. At the age of twenty-three, after completing his undergraduate training in agronomy, he used the money he made from translating scientific writings to travel to the United States. There he spent the rest of his prolific career, making groundbreaking contributions to antibiotic development, tuberculosis research, and environmental philosophy. René Dubos died in New York City on his eighty-first birthday.

Dubos's early work as a translator exposed him to the research of the Russian microbiologist Sergei Wino-gradsky, who stressed the importance of studying soil microbes in their natural setting, not just the sterile conditions of the laboratory. As Dubos reminisced late in life, "I have been restating that idea in all forms ever since. The main intellectual attitude that has governed all aspects of my professional life has been to study things, from microbes to man, not per se but in their complex relationships" (quoted in Kostelanetz 1980, p. 195). He earned his doctorate in agricultural microbiology from Rutgers University in 1927, and soon after won a fellowship from the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research to find a way to disarm the microbe that causes pneumonia by destroying its protective polysaccharide coating. His unconventional approach entailed collecting dozens of soil samples in search of a bacterium that could decompose the material in question. Dubos's success led to his 1939 discovery of gramicidin, the first commercially produced antibiotic, which in turn stimulated efforts by other researchers to develop the antibacterial drugs that revolutionized medicine during the mid-twentieth century.

Dubos's ecological approach enabled him to predict the development of bacterial resistance to antibiotic drugs in the early 1940s, decades before antibiotic drug failure became a global health crisis. His subsequent research on the bacterium that causes tuberculosis, which killed his first wife, sharpened his appreciation of the social determinants of the disease, and his growing conviction that controlling microbial diseases required much more than eradicating the responsible microbes. In The Mirage of Health (1959) and Man Adapting (1965), Dubos challenged the dominant paradigm of scientific medicine by emphasizing the environmental determinants of disease, and the impossibility of vanquishing infectious diseases due to the constant flux of environmental conditions. A colleague at the Rockefeller University, Walsh McDermott, later hailed Dubos as "the conscience of modern medicine."

During the late 1960s and 1970s, Dubos's long career studying the links between environment, health, and disease facilitated his transformation into "the philosopher of the earth," as the New York Times called him near the end of his life. Dubos won the Pulitzer Prize for his book So Human an Animal (1968), in which he presents a holistic critique of modern civilization:

Most of man's problems in the modern world arise from the constant and unavoidable exposure to the stimuli of urban and industrial civilization, the varied aspects of environmental pollution, the physiological disturbances associated with sudden changes in ways of life, the estrangement from the conditions and natural cycles under which human evolution took place, the emotional trauma and the paradoxical solitude in congested cities, the monotony, boredom and compulsory leisure—in brief, all the environmental conditions that undisciplined technology creates. (Dubos 1968, p. 216–217)

In later publications, Dubos elaborated his philosophy that humans can overcome such problems by creating what he called humanized environments that meet modern physiological, emotional, and esthetic human needs. His argument that humans can improve on nature by applying ecological insights to the built environment set him apart from the prominent pessimists of the burgeoning environmental movement, attracting widespread attention. The United Nations commissioned Dubos to chair a group of experts for the landmark 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, and to coauthor its influential background report, Only One Earth (1972).

Dubos's experience with the environmental mega-conferences of the 1970s convinced him that solving global environmental problems requires dealing with them at the regional level, with respect to their unique physical, technological, economic, and cultural contexts. His practical approach spawned the famous phrase Think globally, act locally, which continues to inspire environmental activists around the world. He linked the maxim with his ecological insights and ethical concerns in The Wooing of Earth (1980): "Global thinking and local action both require understanding of ecological systems, but ecological management can be effective only if it takes into consideration the visceral and spiritual values that link us to the earth." Therefore "ecological thinking must be supplemented by humanistic value judgments concerning the effect of our choices and actions on the quality of the relationship between humankind and earth, in the future as well as in the present" (Dubos 1980, p. 157).

To promote such ideas in the policymaking arena, in 1975 he cofounded what later became the internationally recognized René Dubos Center for Human Environments. For reasons that include his prescient warnings against the overuse of antibiotics to his humanistic perception of environmental problems, Dubos deserves a central place among the foremost twentieth-century scholars of science, technology, and ethics.

CHRISTINE KEINER

SEE ALSO Environmental Ethics.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dubos, René. (1968). So Human an Animal. New York: Scribner. A reissue of Dubos's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1968 analysis of technologically-induced dehumanization.

Dubos, René. (1976). "Symbiosis of the Earth and Humankind." Science 193: 459–462.

Dubos, René. (1980). The Wooing of Earth. New York: Scribner.

Eblen, Ruth A. (1990). "Preface." In The World of René Dubos: A Collection from His Writings, eds. Gerard Piel and Osborn Segerberg Jr. New York: Holt.

Eblen, Ruth A. (1994). "René Jules Dubos." In The Encyclopedia of the Environment, eds. Ruth A. Eblen and William R. Eblen. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. This reference work embodies Dubos's humanistic approach to environmental concepts.

Kostelanetz, Richard. (1980). "The Five Careers of René Dubos." Michigan Quarterly Review 19: 194–203. A brief overview of Dubos's multifaceted career.

Moberg, Carol L. (1999). "René Dubos, A Harbinger of Microbial Resistance to Antibiotics." Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 42: 559–581. An analysis of Dubos's prophetic warnings of antibiotic overuse.

Piel, Gerard. (1980). "Foreword." In The World of René Dubos: A Collection from His Writings, eds. Gerard Piel, and Osborn Segerberg Jr. New York: Holt. A compilation of excerpts from Dubos's numerous publications regarding science, medicine, civilization, microbiology, ecology, and environmental management.