Word: dubose
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1940
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Dr. René Jules Dubos of the Rockefeller Institute may possibly some day take rank, along with Gerhard Domagk of Germany and other pioneers who gave the world sulfanilamide. as a great benefactor of chemotherapeutical medicine. Starting with a hunch that there must be agents in the soil capable of...
Several years ago Dr. Dubos, born in France, Ph.D. of Rutgers, set himself to find out. His method was essentially simple. He got a great many soil samples, mixed them with various germ cultures. If there was any organism in the soil sample that found a germ to its liking...
Dr. Dubos first found a soil bacterium that is bad news for pneumococcus, the pneumonia germ. The bacterium secretes an enzyme that dissolves the germ's tough outer covering or capsule, and the stripped pneumococcus is then easy prey for the body's natural defenses, as experiments with...
Then Dubos found in soil samples a spore-bearing bacillus which actually kills five kinds of pneumococcus; staphylococcus (the pus germ), streptococcus, the diphtheria bacillus. The killing agent is a non-protein substance which Dr. Dubos has isolated in crystalline form. One hundred-thousandth of a gram* of the stuff...
Unlike the sulfonamide compounds (sulfanilamide, sulfapyridine, sulfathiazole, etc.), which have abundantly proved their worth for humans, gramicidin has so far been tried only on animals. Dr. Dubos prefers to regard his work to date as an adventure in experimental science. Doctors are keeping their fingers crossed, but at Cleveland they...