Microzymian Theory or The Germ Theory of Disease
On Ethel D Hume’s “Bechamp or Pasteur? A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology”
A few weeks ago I had an interesting interaction on Twitter with a stranger. He made the claim that The Germ Theory of Disease — which is the presently accepted explanation for infectious diseases — had been disproven. After a cordial debate, he asked me to read the book, Bechamp or Pasteur? A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology, that validated his claim. It is on this book’s premise that I write this essay.
In her book, Ethel makes two arguments: i) the French scientist Louis Pasteur plagiarized the works of Antoine Bechamp, and ii) that the germ theory of disease is a fraud. Given that I am not a historian of science, I will refrain from engaging with the first point. After careful deliberation, I still maintain that Ethel Hume did not disprove the germ theory of disease.
The germ theory of disease argues that microorganisms (not just bacteria) known as pathogens can lead to disease. This is the benchmark of infectious diseases like cholera, chlamydia, malaria, COVID-19, etcetera. History has it that Bechamp disagreed to implicating microorganisms as the cause of diseases.
The major tenet of Bechamp’s microzymian theory, as Ethel put it, is that illness is practically a result of diet or manner of living. Bechamp argued that all cells have tiny “molecular granulations” — which he referred to as microzymas — that serve to build and recycle an organism. The argument further states that the microzymas respond to changes, such as pH, in the cellular environment. In this regard, microzymas are both beneficent and maleficent depending on the state of our internal environment. If the environment is compromised, the microzymas lead to illnesses. The microzyma being thus the fundamental element of corporate life, it may become morbid through a change in function and thus be the starting point of disease.
Ethel further argues that microorganisms are as important and necessary to human life as those found elsewhere in nature, therefore, they cannot possibly cause diseases.
But if what Ethel says is true, why are we all obsessed with implicating “innocent” microorganisms? She stands that the vast majority of scientists till date have been misled and blindly uphold the germ theory. However, the germ theory rests on the shoulders of Koch’s postulates. As we have seen, Antoine Bechamp seemed to have dismissed the germ theory on the premise that the presence of microorganisms was correlative and not causative. On the other hand, Robert Koch gave very concise steps to ascribe a microbe-disease causal relationship. The logic behind it, in our day, may seem pretty much intuitive. It is from Koch’s postulates that we are able to arrive at specific pathogens — say SARS-Cov-2 — for infectious diseases. What Ethel fails to do is to offer a refutation for Koch’s postulates.
Another mistake Ethel makes is she leaps to say no microorganisms are harmful. Quite right, there is a plethora of microorganisms that are useful to us — and the biosphere at large. Azotobacter and Rhizobium, for example, are important genera of free-living soil microbes that fix nitrogen for plants — I need not go into the mechanism of nitrogen fixation and why plants need nitrogen. Indeed, we have a plethora of microorganisms that live in our digestive tracts. These make up what is known as the gut microbiota. However, these harmless microorganisms do not absolve V. cholerae of its role in cholera. If anything, in a biosphere filled with so much diversity, it should not come as a surprise that other microorganisms harm us. I think of Ethel’s logic sounding more like ‘This species of mushroom is edible. Therefore, all species of mushrooms are edible’. Imagine where we would be if Alexander Fleming denied that the fungus penicillium killed his bacterial culture because all fungi are useful, not harmful.
As if this is not enough, Ethel fails to refute why we even have white blood cells. In a biosphere filled with evolutionary arms races, it is very explicable why we would evolve such specialized cells. She opines that leukocytes are not living tissue but rather waste or refuse in the process of elimination. She further states that leukocytes cannot actually be the body’s defense because the more of them there are the less the body seems safeguarded. In my opinion, I think Ethel is under the illusion that life is supposed to be perfect, i.e if the leukocytes are meant for defense, they should not attack the same body they are trying to defend. A simple look at autoimmune diseases, of course, easily refutes her conclusions. Life is much more complex and cannot be reduced to such simple axioms. More so, leukocytes cannot possibly be refuse because we have a firm understanding of how they are generated.
My interlocutor drove home the point that he does not trust modern medicine because it is benchmarked on the supposedly fraudulent germ theory of disease. He denies that SARS-Cov-2 causes COVID-19. He implored me to look at the data given by Ethel Hume and be baptized into the microzymian doctrine.
Alas, the only thing I walked away with from Ethel is that, instead of disproving the germ theory of disease, she spent a great deal slinging ad hominems at Louis Pasteur. Unfortunately, I have come to learn that there are many others who tout that Ethel effectively demolished the germ theory of disease. Theories, indeed, are never absolute, but if one wants to disprove the germ theory of disease, they better begin with the refutation of Koch’s postulates and later reasonably dismantle a slew of biological disciplines.
