“Go to the microbe, thou scientist, consider its ways and be wise.”
– Oswald T. Avery, 1941

It has been 35 years since René Dubos, already a Pulitzer Prize winning Emeritus Professor of The Rockefeller University, authored a biography of his former mentor and colleague, Oswald T. Avery. The resulting document is still revealing, not least because one giant of microbiology wrote intimately of another, but for the parallels drawn between Dubos’ two proclaimed heroes, Avery and The Rockefeller Institute. Avery’s story, Dubos argues rather convincingly, is the story of the Institute, whose mission to cement a science of biomedicine in the first half of the twentieth century was writ in Avery’s scientific quest. That quest started with a disease-causing microbe and ended with the monumental discovery that DNA is the molecule of heredity.

That journey, as Dubos skillfully highlights, was not an easy or intuitive one. At the turn of the 20th century, medical science was considered something of an oxymoron. Few were convinced that abstract investigations in the laboratory could have any bearing on medical practice in the hospital. Yet some, among them John D. Rockefeller, became convinced that it might. The establishment of The Rockefeller Institute was thus a gamble; it was a place where for the first time, physicians and researchers who believed that the scientific method could be applied to human disease were free to explore unknown frontiers. In these early years, the Institute, most notably the hospital, sought to recruit medical doctors who dared to believe that greater therapeutic potential existed in laboratory studies over rounds at the hospital ward. Avery was one such individual.

We are in expert hands as Dubos tells Avery’s story and frames the medical problems of the day, in part because Dubos was a member of Avery’s laboratory from 1927 to 1941. As a result, Dubos is a sensitive and intuitive biographer of his beloved colleague, tracing Avery’s origins as the son of a Canadian Baptist minister transplanted into the raucous Lower East Side of 1890s New York, to his scientific training at the Hoagland Laboratory in Brooklyn as a young M.D. that led to his eventual appointment at The Rockefeller Institute in 1913.

Dubos’ subsequent rendition of Avery’s scientific life can be considered definitive, and is a fascinating read. Avery’s study of lobar pneumonia, caused by pneumococcal bacteria, led him to delve deeper into the inner workings of the bacterial cell. Here he made seminal observations with A.R. Dochez of a specific soluble substance of bacterial origin that could be detected in the blood and urine of infected patients. With Michael Heidelberger, Avery went on to show that this soluble substance was composed of polysaccharide, a surprising finding when many thought it would be a protein. In Avery’s subsequent search for how the polysaccharide worked to promote virulence, one can glimpse founding moments of cellular immunology, immunochemistry, and a slew of other disciplines that came in his wake.

Whereas many biographies of scientists by scientists (most usually in the form of eulogies) focus exclusively on their professional work, Dubos plumbs his personal memories of Avery to offer the reader an insightful and intimate view of Avery’s personality as a driving force behind the science, and of the institute he made his home. We rejoice in Avery’s triumphs and taste the bitterness of his failures on the sixth floor of the hospital. We also witnessed a steady and characteristic tenacity towards asking and answering big questions in microbiology, whether on polysaccharides, the first viable antibiotics (of which Dubos played a central role), or of DNA. Here was a man who did what he loved, and in the process helped craft The Rockefeller Institute as a premier center for biomedical research.

Dubos gracefully addresses the subsequent debate regarding Avery’s notable omission from receiving a Nobel Prize for his contribution to the discovery of DNA. Yet, the biography remains focused on Avery the man, whose work, while expertly and accessibly described, is ultimately a reflection of the strengths and limitations of Avery’s character. Dubos’ Avery is a complex figure, at once fearless in his pursuit of scientific truth but cautious in its broader interpretation. He is charming, affable and a showman among his peers, but intensely private and at times a thoroughly lonely introvert. Nevertheless, Avery is unambiguously a genius. Dubos’ portrait is of a man of extraordinary talent, unquenchable scientific resolve and a limitlessly creative mind within the humble frame of a man who sought, with almost puritanical zeal, to restrain from speculation beyond experimental fact.

All these years later, Dubos’ biography of Avery leaves many timeless questions for the modern researcher to ponder. What is the ideal scientist? Does the scientist seek only to carve out a series of facts by experimentation, eschewing excessive interpretation as to the significance of his or her discovery? Or is open speculation and active engagement required of scientists to defend, popularize, and otherwise market their ideas and results? Avery of course, practiced much more of the former, in stark contrast to Dubos who spent much of his later career as a very public figure in the American environmental movement. Both were titans of biomedical science, but it is tempting to speculate that Dubos, as Avery’s mentee, learned from Avery’s example that one’s science, however brilliant, may not always be enough to garner the recognition it deserves.

Then again, the story of Oswald T. Avery’s life is beautiful because it speaks for itself. And with René Dubos as a biographer, Avery’s story is all the more radiant.