We respect Dr. Trudeau and all those earlier scientists who didthe best they could within the contemporary understanding of theproblem they addressed and utilizing the materials and technologythey had at hand. Modern-day biologists like to talk aboutresistance/susceptibility genes and patterns of inheritance, ratherthan family blood. They think about infectious disease in terms ofmicrobes and pathogenicity, rather than speaking of bad humors.They have identified vitamins and other nutrients that are abundantin some foodstuffs and lacking in other that are essential foroptimal immune function. Without the benefit of such modernformulations, Dr. Trudeau, by a disciplined application ofscientific curiosity and careful, clever methodology, shed light oneach of these concerns, light that helped to illuminate the mindsof scientists who came after. Still, a look at his original paperleaves us wondering, were the rabbits genetically identical?Probably not! Why? Were they all of the same sex and age? Couldn’the have given the animals kept on short rations just a smalleramount of the same varieties of food available to the animals fedabundantly—after all, there might be some important nutrientmissing in potatoes. In light of the title of the paper, why notmeasure bacterial numbers in the rabbits on post mortem rather thanjust survival time? (In a subsequent paper, he did exactly that.)Once you start critiquing an experiment from 100 years ago, or 10years ago, or sometimes even last year, it’s hard to stop. Can youthink of anything else you would have changed about the RabbitIsland Experiment?
