Dubos had laboratories on the third floor of New North Wing, just below the laboratories of the Rockefeller Foundation, where Nobel Prize winner Max Theiler worked, with a number of other distinguished arbovirologists. Just along the passage were three other distinguished scientists: Peyton Rous, who was to receive the Nobel prize in 1966, 50 years after his demonstration that Rous sarcoma virus was responsible for malignancy; Rollin Hotchkiss, who was patiently demonstrating that pneumococcal ‘transformation’, discovered by Oswald Avery, was indeed due to DNA and not a protein; and Merrill Chase, who had just escaped from the teutonic supervision of Karl Landsteiner to carry out important work on tuberculosis, independently of supervision.
Being new to the field, I carried out research suggested by Dubos and some experiments, more or less in parallel, with the ‘Bairnsdale bacillus’. Five papers emerged from my research there, the most important being a method of counting viable tubercle bacilli (Fenner, 1951).
René Jules Dubos
Dubos was a fascinating character, very different from Burnet. He had five post-doctoral fellows (as I was classified) working with him. He himself did little laboratory work at that time, but planned the experiments and often wrote them up. At the end of each day he would assemble all of us in his office, sit with his feet up on the table, and ask each of us to describe any interesting results. Then he would pick out an ‘interesting result’ and erect what I called an ‘inverted pyramid’ of speculation, which usually fell down but occasionally led to novel experiments. He invited Bobbie and me to his house on the upper Hudson River for weekends on several occasions. I will never forget my first experience of spring in a deciduous forest. He and I developed very close relationships. I always visited him when I went to New York, we maintained an extensive correspondence for many years, and in 1968 I persuaded him and his wife Jean to come out to Canberra, an experience that he greatly enjoyed. He later became an environmental guru who certainly influenced my later life as Director of the ANU’s Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies (see Moberg, 2005).