Obituaries : Jean Porter Dubos; Tuberculosis Expert
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NEW YORK — Jean Porter Dubos, a microbiologist who was co-author with her husband of a classic history of tuberculosis and a collaborator on his 1969 Pulitzer Prize-winning book of nonfiction, has died.
She was 70 when she died Saturday of cancer at her home here, Rockefeller University announced Monday.
Mrs. Dubos, whose husband died in 1982, began her career as a lab assistant in the Dubos Laboratory of Comparative Pathology and Tropical Medicine at Harvard Medical School in 1942.
She then returned with Rene Jules Dubos in 1944 to what was then Rockefeller Institute, where they established a laboratory to study tuberculosis. She became his second wife in 1946.
They wrote “The White Plague--Tuberculosis, Man and Society,” considered a classic history of tuberculosis. The 1950 book, reprinted last year, stresses social reform rather than surgical intervention or chemotherapy to control the disease.
She also was a collaborator on “So Human an Animal: How We Are Shaped by Surroundings and Events,” which won her husband a Pulitzer for general nonfiction in 1969.
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