Arts and Letters

(In keeping with the conservative policies of our organization, which waited until René Dubos was in his late seventies to elect him to our body, I have waited fourteen months after his death to read this memorial. Although I believe I was his proposer, what I have learned from reading his life and work during the past year has made me marvel more than ever that such a humane and civilized Gallic giant moved among us. In his second or probably third language—he lived in Italy when he was twenty-one to twenty-three—he was not, I think, a great American stylist. His literacy was that of a scientist turned prophet, and one would no more rap his knuckles for a certain stiffness of style than quarrel with Whitman or Dreiser about reticence. That we had the wit to elect him shows us on the whole to be the superior judges we lay claim in our elections to be. These remarks are not part of the memorial but a personal expression of honor at having been asked to write it.)

René Dubos was born in 1901 in the small French city of Saint-Brice-sous-Forêt and grew up in the small agricultural villages of the Île-de-France north of Paris. His father's death from a head wound suffered in The Great War necessitated his giving up a career as a scholar of history. He entered the Institut National Agronomique and took a B.S. degree. For two years he edited a scientific journal in Rome and then in 1924 came to the United States, where he spent the rest of his life.

It was a life in which he identified certain critical encounters. At the age of ten he contracted rheumatic fever and over the next seven years, while restricted in physical activity, cultivated a habit of meditating. Hippolyte Taine's Essay on the Fables of La Fontaine, which he read at the age of fifteen, had a lasting effect on him. Taine's thesis that the spirit of the fables can be accounted for by the landscape where the author lived made Dubos aware of the influence of environment on an individual's development, a theory which became a mystique for him as a scientist. In Rome, in 1922, he read in a French journal a semi-popular article by a Russian bacteriologist named Sergei Winogradsky which contended that soil microbes should be studied in their own environment, not in pure cultures grown in laboratories. The idea that microbes might have a different life history under natural rather than artificial conditions struck him so forcibly that he decided to become a bacteriologist. "This is really where my scholarly life began," he said later. "I have been restating that idea in all forms ever since."

By the kind of happy accident that became his special response to the world, he guided around Rome, to earn money for his passage to America, a Rutgers microbiologist who would later become a Nobel laureate, met him again on the ship carrying them to America, and took his Ph.D. at Rutgers under this scientist, Selman A. Waksman.

Another influence was Louis Pasteur, about whom Dubos wrote two books, and from whom he said he got the idea which enabled him to find the enzyme which would break down the protective capsule protecting the bacteria causing lobar pneumonia. It had been Pasteur who maintained that in some form or another natural energy exists to break down or decompose any organic substance. The scientist Oswald T. Avery, who predicted DNA in 1944, was influential in calling Dubas to the Rockefeller Institute (now Rockefeller University) in 1927, where, except for two years at Harvard, he remained as Emeritus Professor until his death. His experimental work laid grounds for the practical use of antibiotics, and he was a pioneer in this field.

His last and probably most enduring scientific discovery has to do with what he learned from Hippolyte Taine. He argued that the greatest threat to humankind may not be the environmental hazards we are creating but our capacity to adapt to them—an accommodation which can occur only by means of disastrous social and cultural mechanisms.

"It is not man the ecological crisis threatens to destroy," he wrote in 1970, "but the quality of human life, the attributes that make human life different from animal life…. What we call humanness is the expression of the interplay between man's nature and the environment, an interplay which is as old as life itself and which is the mechanism for creation on earth." His language in that article for the old Life magazine is characteristically straight and unembellished and conventional, as though he had foresworn style for some greater urgency. He was fired with prophetic zeal in his last books. Less humor lightens their message, but there is a compensating beauty of precision. Anyone can read them, and he knew the problems of readership in his adopted and beloved country.

"The most deplorable aspect of existence in American cities," he wrote, "may not be murder, rape, and robbery, but the constant exposure of children to pollutants, noise, ugliness, and garbage in the streets. This constant exposure conditions children to accept public squalor as the normal state of affairs and thereby handicaps them mentally at the beginning of their lives."

His writing after 1960 was more and more concerned with the science of ecology. In 1969 his book So Human an Animal: How We Are Shaped by Surroundings and Events shared a Pulitzer Prize in non-fiction with Norman Mailer. In 1972 he and Barbara Ward published a book which remains, The New York Times said in his obituary, a fundamental work in the field, Only One Earth, a work commissioned by the Secretary General of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment.

In a late interview, he spoke on genetics. "I admit that, yes, we know fairly well the mechanisms by which hereditary characteristics are transferred—but from there to state that we understand life! This is a word which, as we use it, is simply not encompassed by a molecule. Life implies an organization, and ability to change, even a 'capacity to blunder' as Lewis Thomas cleverly points out in The Medusa and the Snail…. There's a great mystery in this phenomenon we call life."

He was a tangible presence at our meetings. A tall, grave, deep-voiced, humorous man, he spoke only generously, and he spoke as a populist, in plain if formal language. His great heart stopped on his eighty-first birthday, February 20, 1982.

The last words I remember hearing from him, by the way—he and I had proposed Lewis Thomas for membership in 1980—were these: "What should we do next about getting Lew Thomas in here?"