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Rene Dubos, The White Plague, 1952; and The Unseen World, 1962 One of Waksman's first students, Rene Dubos arrived at Rutgers' University already familiar with Winogradsky's ecological views. Dubos recalled that working towards Ph.D. in soil microbiology under Waksman, was done "in the spirit of Winogradsky." In 1927, when Dubos shifted his interests from soil microbiology to medical bacteriology, he brought WInogradsky's ecological perspective with him. At Oswald Avery's laboratory at the Rockefeller Institute, Dubos applied the lessons of soil microbiology to discover how to destroy the protective envelope of pneumococcal pneumonia. As he explained to Avery: "if there were no enzyme that could decompose that capsular polysaccharide, it would accumulate in nature; there would be mountains of it now. There must be, somewhere in nature, some microbe that would decompose it." Within
two years he had found that microbe and had set the foundation for
developing antibiotics. |
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Lloyd
Ackert Whitney Humanities Center Yale University 53 Wall Street P.O. Box 208298 New Haven, CT 06520-8298 Office: (203).432.3112 lloydackert@sbcglobal.net |
The
library is located in the Yale University School of Medicine Building 333 Cedar Street New Haven, CT Map, Directions |