HILARY KOPROWSKI 
easily survive to reach the other worlds, and second, some of the 
invading extraterrestrials may not seem as alien to us as might 
be expected in comparison with these two curios of our own 
world. ‘This holds true only if bug life on other planets is based 
on a carbon and water cycle. 
Future dealings with the extraterrestrials and with our own 
variety of microbes will depend much on the frequency and 
degree of stupidity among the men who will occupy themselves 
with these problems. Ifa universal antibiotic became available 
in the future and were used for prevention and therapy of 
human infections on a mass scale, a major disaster would befall 
the human species. There is no greater nightmare to dream 
about the future than the creation of a germ-free man. None 
other than Cyrano de Bergerac in his Histoire Comique des Etats 
et Empires de la Lune et du Soleil showed clearly the necessity of 
rearing man in the state of benign infection: “Perhaps our 
flesh, our blood and our vital principles are nothing but a 
texture of little animals holding together, lending us movement 
from their own and blindly allowing our will to drive them like 
a coachman, yet drive us too and all together produce that 
action we call life.” 
Germ-free animals are laboratory artifacts and anatomo- 
physiological anomalies which may serve a useful purpose as 
research tools, particularly in order to show how easy it is to 
upset the germ-free condition. Dubos and Schaedler indicated in 
1962 that mice which have been reared free of coliform bacteria 
and enterococci, although not germ-free, have an abnormally 
reduced indigenous flora of the gut. Exposure of these mice to 
an antibiotic such as penicillin in the drinking water causes an 
explosive increase in the number of coliform bacteria and 
enterococci. Similar results are achieved by a single injection 
of endotoxin. Removal of either antibiotic or endotoxin is 
followed by a decrease in bacterial population. 
Thus the future of infectious diseases as well as other problems 
of mankind will depend on the resources and ingenuity of men 
of the future in coping with these problems. If they understand, 
as many people do not, that man has to live with his infections 
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