Adventures with spiral bugs and Helicobacter.

Abstract

hese adventures began in 1967 when I was lucky enough to get a post-doctoral fellowship at the Rockefeller University in New York. This was in the laboratory of René Dubos, a distinguished microbiologist who was the first to systematically find an antibiotic, to pioneer the investigation of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, but who recently had become interested in the microbial flora of the intestinal tract (Moberg, 2005). Indeed, Dubos really can be considered to be the Father of the gut microbiome, which is currently all the rage, sixty years later (Prescott, 2017). His group worked with germ-free (GF) and specific-pathogen-free (SPF) mice, studying the bacteria in their intestinal tracts and the impact of factors such as nutrition, stress, maternal care, housing conditions, social interactions and sanitation on immune functions and health over the lifespan of the mice. With colleague Russell Schaedler, Dubos was the first to consider the digestive tract as an ecosystem. In their words: “Recent studies have revealed that there exists in normal animals an abundant and characteristic microflora, not only in the large intestine but also in all the other parts of the digestive tract ... they become so intimately associated with the various digestive organs that they form with them a well-defined