Destroyers From Soil

Sooner or later, whatever the earth produces it wrecks and reclaims. The wrecking job is done by an immense host of microorganisms. So it occurred to Dr. Rene Jules Dubos of the Rockefeller Institute that there might exist in the earth powerful microorganisms capable of attacking disease germs that prey on humanity.

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, the organism would devour it, thrive in such numbers that the scientist could identify and culture the organism. When Pioneer Dubos told his latest results last week to the American College of Physicians in Cleveland, he got an ovation.

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 living mice showed.

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 is enough to destroy a billion pneumococci in two hours.

This crystalline killer has been named "gramicidin" because its victims all belong to the large class of microbes which take the gentian violet and iodine stain developed by Hans Christian Joachim Gram of Denmark. Gramicidin protects mice against huge doses of virulent pneumococci and all the other blue-staining germs so far tested. Since the tubercle bacillus belongs to this group, it seems almost certain to succumb to gramicidin too.

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 hollered their heads off for the experiment.

* 31.1035 gram == 1 oz.

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