BOOK REVIEW : A Scientific Glimpse at ‘Man vs. Nature’ : THE WORLD OF RENE DUBOS<i> Edited by Gerard Piel and Osborn Segerberg Jr.</i> Henry Holt & Co.$29.95, 418 pages

A youthful R. Buckminster Fuller, according to a story widely repeated by scientists, once eagerly asked Einstein how he kept track of all his ideas. Did he write them on the backs of envelopes? Did he keep a notebook in his pocket? A tape recorder?

“Young man,” the great physicist patiently replied, “I have had only two ideas.”

As the present book shows, the late microbiologist Rene Dubos, who is now generally acknowledged to be one of the 20th Century’s most distinguished scientists, likewise had only two ideas. And those ideas may well prove to help humankind as much as certain applications of Einstein’s thought have threatened it.

One of Dubos’ ideas is that man can improve nature. “It is not true that ‘Nature knows best,’ ” Dubos writes. “It often creates ecosystems that are inefficient, wasteful and destructive. (It) is to be seen . . . as a garden to be cultivated for the development of its own potentialities for the human adventure.”

Dubos’ other idea is that life must be studied in its natural surroundings, not just in a test tube. By studying nature only in an artificial environment, Dubos writes, “science is betraying the very spirit of its vocation . . . nature exists in ecosystems.”

These are surprising statements coming from a man who spent half of his 81 years standing at a laboratory bench and teasing apart bacteria, especially in view of Dubos’ extraordinary success in that enterprise. He made the key discovery that led, in 1938, to the first commercially produced antibiotic, and the tuberculosis vaccine he later developed is still in use today.

The transplanted Frenchman wrote, in masterful English, 22 books and hundreds of articles during his long career, many of them for the lay public. His book “So Human an Animal,” in fact, won the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction in 1969. The present collection of his writings was judiciously selected by co-editor Gerard Piel, the founding publisher of “Scientific American” and a longtime friend of Dubos. It combines readings from a wide variety of sources: scientific and medical journals, popular science magazines, newspapers, journals in architecture and the humanities, and books for specialized as well as general audiences.

The collection’s modes of discourse are at least as varied. The published pieces include a technical report to a medical association and a sermon delivered at New York City’s cathedral of St. John the Divine. Arrayed between those poles are newspaper op-ed pieces, popular essays and feature articles for magazines, university lectures, speeches to environmentalists, architects and other audiences, personal columns for a scholarly journal, interviews and chapters from his books.

In all these pieces Dubos follows the ramifications of his two ideas along a striking variety of paths. His subjects include, among many others, the history of the tulip, a rebuttal of popular theories accounting for the population explosion (or “avalanche,” which he prefers for its connotation of acceleration), a discussion of the cause of the common cold, a celebration of New York City architecture and culture, a 1968 warning against asbestos, an inquiry into what constitutes human nature, and a biographical sketch of Louis Pasteur. Each piece is charged with Dubos’ radically original imagination, and each is leavened by his “despairing optimism” (his phrase) about humankind’s prospects.

Described in this way, the book sounds like a bewildering smorgasbord. On the contrary, it is a superbly balanced and tasty intellectual feast. The man within the prose remains consistently welcoming, and his unfolding thought so winningly captivates the reader that even science-phobes, if they only give Dubos a chance, will be swept happily along.

This is not to say that the book is light reading. Its demanding arrangement deliberately reflects Dubos’ view that knowledge should be earned the hard way: “When I retired . . . I was asked to teach in two universities. I seemed to be a big success. But I was a ‘big success’ in a way I found extremely dangerous. The students saw me, at the end of my life, working on very general problems and making observations about every discipline, be it social, medical or scientific. Immediately they wanted to do the same thing. . . . Yet I’d tell them every day, ‘I want to stress that for forty years I was the most disciplined microbiologist possible, and not until I realized that I’d mastered that discipline could I permit myself to look at it from the outside.’ . . . When you believe that, above all, the most indispensable thing is to view problems in terms of their interrelationships rather than in terms of the elements they’re made up of, it means that you must first be very familiar with those elements. If not, you’re just jabbering.”

Amid the jabbering of today’s media marketplace, this timeless collection of writing eloquently reminds us that there are still giants on the earth. “The World of Rene Dubos” deserves a place in every library.

Next: Jonathan Kirsch reviews “ Brave New Families: Stories of Domestic Upheaval in Late 20th Century America “ (Basic Books).