In the scant hundred years since Pasteur developed the germ theory of disease, medical scientists have concentrated on helping the patient by attacking the germs, first with preventive vaccines, latterly with antibiotics that arrest or alter the course of full-blown disease. Last week, before a packed audience at the New York Academy of Medicine, Dr. René Jules Dubos, most imaginative of Pasteur's scientific heirs, suggested a radically new approach: work not on the microbes but on the patient, so that the microbe-invaders will never have a chance to cause disease.
What started the...