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De Kruif began his vocation at the University of Michigan, obtaining a PhD. in microbiology. After graduation, he joined the military service, first as a private on the Pancho Villa Expedition in Mexico, and then as an officer in the Sanitary Corps during World War I, where he had occasion to meet many leading French scientists of the day.In 1925, de Kruif assisted Sinclair Lewis in the research for his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about the state of medicine in the U.S. during the 1920s, Arrowsmith, for which he received 25 percent of royalties. The very next year de Kruif published his own book, Microbe Hunters, which became a bestseller and still remains on recommended reading lists for phycicians and scientists.De Kruif supported the belief that healthcare should be made available to everyone, regardless of their ability to pay for treatments and services -something Detroit Free Press science writer Boyce Rensberger pointed out was "tantamount to treason among members of the medical community" in the 1950s, particularly the American Medical Association, which considered de Kruif a communist. In the words of Rensberger, de Kruif "fought an economic system that at the time withheld modern medicine's benefit for all but the wealthy."
