Background
Dubos was born in Saint-Brice, in west-central France, on February 20, 1901. His parents His parents, Georges Andre Dubos and Adeline De Bloe'dt operated butcher shops.
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('Complete freedom from disease and from struggle is almos...)
'Complete freedom from disease and from struggle is almost incompatible with the process of living, ' Rene Dubos asserted in this classic essay on ecology and health. All the accomplishments of science and technology, he argued, will not bring the utopian dream of universal well-being, because they ignore the dynamic process of adaptation to a constantly changing environment that every living organism must face.
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Dubos was born in Saint-Brice, in west-central France, on February 20, 1901. His parents His parents, Georges Andre Dubos and Adeline De Bloe'dt operated butcher shops.
René received his early education in agricultural science at the National Institute of Agronomy, in Paris. He went to the United States in 1924 and attended Rutgers University, where he obtained his Ph. D. in 1927. He then joined the faculty of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (now Rockefeller University) in New York City, as a member of the department of environmental medicine.
René became an American citizen in 1938. Except for a period during World War II when he was professor of tropical medicine at the Harvard University School of Medicine, Dubos remained at the Rockefeller Institute for the rest of his professional life. Dubos was particularly interested in the effect of soil bacteria on pathogenic, or disease-causing, bacteria. In 1939 he isolated from the soil bacterium Bacillus brevis a peptide substance that he named tyrothricin. Tyrothricin was of limited use in combating disease, but Dubos' findings led to the discovery of streptomycin and other antibiotics, which began a revolution in the treatment of infectious disease. Later in his career, Dubos found himself drawn to wider fields of endeavor. By the 1960's, he had all but abandoned his microbiology to campaign for the environment in a series of books, essays, and speeches. His book on humanity and the environment, So Human an Animal, won a Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction in 1969.
('Complete freedom from disease and from struggle is almos...)
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National Academy of Sciences
Rene Dubos was shy and reserved.
In 1934 Dubos married to Marie Louise Bonnet, French immigrant with severe rheumatic heart disease, who was studying French symbolist poetry at Columbia. She died in 1942 from tuberculosis. In 1946 Rene Dubos married to (Letha) Jean Porter, his research assistant, who also developed tuberculosis but survived. They acquired a farm in the Hudson River Valley and spent a large part of each year there, enjoying country life and planting trees.