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(Download PDF) Immunity How Elie Metchnikoff Changed The Course of Modern Medicine First Edition Luba Vikhanski Online Ebook All Chapter PDF
(Download PDF) Immunity How Elie Metchnikoff Changed The Course of Modern Medicine First Edition Luba Vikhanski Online Ebook All Chapter PDF
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Copyright © 2016 by Luba Vikhanski
ISBN 978-1-61373-113-0
I - My Metchnikoff
1 - Reversal of Fortune
2 - The Paris Obsession
V - Legacy
45 - Metchnikoff’s Life
46 - Metchnikoff’s Policemen
47 - Ultimate Closure
48 - Living to 150
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
A NOTE ABOUT NAMES
THE VARIOUS NAMES ILYA ILYICH METCHNIKOFF used outside his native
Russia reflect the adjustments people inevitably make when reaching
out to foreign audiences or adapting themselves to new countries.
When he published his papers abroad, and later when he left
Russia, he changed his first name, Ilya, to that by which his
namesake prophet—Elijah in the English-speaking world—went in
each particular country: Elias in Germany and Elie in France. He
wrote his last name so that it would be pronounced as close as
possible to the original Russian: Mecznikow, Metschnikoff, and finally
Metchnikoff, as spelled in France, where he ultimately settled.
Mechnikov, the standard transliteration of his last name, reflects its
Russian spelling but not the pronunciation; the -ov endings of
Russian names sound more like -off.
The numerous variations have occasionally resulted in a lack of
consistency even within a single organization. His Nobel Prize
diploma, for example, states his name as Elie Metchnikoff, but the
official Nobel Prize website lists him as Ilya Mechnikov.
I refer to him as Ilya during his earlier years, but when writing
about his later life, I’ve chosen to use the first and last names he
ultimately adopted outside Russia: Elie Metchnikoff. In France, his
first name is spelled Élie, but in English-language publications, it has
always been spelled without the acute accent, as it is in this book.
I
MY METCHNIKOFF
1
REVERSAL OF FORTUNE
ON JULY 15, 1916, THE WEATHER in Paris was overcast and oppressively
humid. Bleak light poured through the metal-framed windows of
Louis Pasteur’s former apartment upon gold-patterned wallpaper,
oriental rugs, and carved antique furniture. The museum-like
residence at the Pasteur Institute was filled with oil paintings, vases,
statuettes, and other works of art Pasteur had received as gifts from
grateful admirers. As Elie Metchnikoff lay in this shrine of science,
pillows propping his large head with its mane of gray hair and beard,
he held the hand of his wife Olga, fifty-seven, a slim, oval-faced
blonde sitting at his bedside. He had devoted his entire life to
science. Now science was letting him down.
Metchnikoff knew he was dying, but his worst fear was not death
itself. What he dreaded most was that his passing away at seventy-
one, decades too early by his own standards, would discredit his
theories about life, health, and longevity.
He had been much better at creating new areas of research than
at fitting into existing ones. The 1908 Nobel Prize in Physiology or
Medicine had been his reward for helping found the modern science
of immunity. He had then launched the first systematic study of
aging, coining the term gerontology. In future generations, he
argued, people could live to 150. To stay healthy, he believed they
had to repopulate their intestines with beneficial microbes to replace
harmful ones—for instance, by eating yogurt or other forms of sour
milk.
Coming from such an acclaimed scientist, these ideas had
created a sensation, making him an international celebrity and
turning sour milk into a global mania. In a 1911 poll by a British
magazine, he had been voted one of the ten greatest men in the
world. But now that his heart was failing him less than halfway to his
own target, his teachings threatened to die with him.
“Remember your promise—you’ll perform my autopsy,” he told an
Italian physician who entered the room, one of his numerous
trainees at the Pasteur Institute, where Metchnikoff had worked for
nearly three decades. “And pay attention to my intestines, I think
there’s something there.” Even after his death, he hoped to be doing
what he had done all his life: serving as his own subject for
research. When he made an abrupt movement, Olga pleaded with
him to lie still. He didn’t answer; his head had fallen back on the
pillow.
The tricolor national flag on the Pasteur Institute’s facade was
lowered to half-mast, draped in black.
Millions of people were dying in a world war that had been raging
for nearly two years, but this particular death was major news
around the globe. The international press was unanimous in praising
Metchnikoff, placing him beside Pasteur, Lord Lister, and Robert Koch
among “the immortals in the lifesaving science of bacteriology.” But
just as he had feared, his death delivered a fatal blow to his theories
of longevity.
Soon afterward, his name sank into oblivion. Hardly anyone
followed up on his research, neither in aging nor in immunity. Only
the yogurt craze he had launched on both sides of the Atlantic
proved immortal. Indeed, outside the Pasteur Institute, to the extent
that he was remembered at all after his death—except by historically
minded immunologists and a handful of life-extension enthusiasts—it
was usually in connection with yogurt.
There was one exception. In his homeland, Ilya Ilyich
Metchnikoff was not just remembered but revered, and not at all
because of yogurt.
When I was a girl growing up in Moscow in the early 1970s,
Metchnikoff was known as the Russian Pasteur and upheld as a
shining example of national talent. In company with Russia’s other
historic heroes, he was a cult figure, glorified by the Soviet regime
as a way of instilling in the population a sense of belonging to a
great nation. In my ninth-grade textbook, the ideologically weighted
History of the USSR, he was canonized as “a model of selfless
service to the Fatherland and to science.” Like all the children in
Moscow’s Secondary School No. 732, to say nothing of the rest of
the fifty million or so schoolchildren in the Soviet Union, I learned
that Metchnikoff’s valiant struggles against “bourgeois ethos” had
helped pave the way for “Leninism, the highest achievement of
Russian and world culture in the imperialist era.”
But like many children of dissidents (my family had long-standing
scores to settle with the repressive Soviet regime), I loathed this
hero worship. In fact, I secretly suspected that Metchnikoff was a
fake, together with most other Russian greats in my textbook, their
accomplishments primarily products of communist propaganda.
When I left Russia for good at seventeen, I would have been quite
happy never to hear about any of them again.
Thirty years passed. While working as a science writer in Israel in
the mid-2000s, I received an e-mail from Leslie Brent, a
distinguished professor of immunology in the United Kingdom. In a
search I had undertaken for little-known but key episodes in the
history of science, I had asked him to list great immunologists whose
life stories, in his opinion, had yet to be properly told. Metchnikoff’s
name, high on Professor Brent’s list, jumped out at me. It brought
back memories of my teenage self with my braids, fountain pens,
and brown wool high school uniform. I was shocked by my own
myopia. Had I wrongly dismissed a genius in my overall rejection of
the party line?
To clear up this possible error of judgment that had been trailing
me since childhood, I decided to investigate. Who was this man?
Was he really as great as my textbooks had proclaimed him to be?
Delving into accounts of Metchnikoff’s life, I discovered a tale
worthy of becoming a legend. It was the story of a boy who grew up
in an obscure village, dreamed about creating a theory that would
revolutionize medicine—and went on to author the modern concept
of immunity as an inner curative power. Today we take it for granted
that our immune system protects us from within; it is hard to
imagine that just over a century ago, mainstream medicine had no
notion of the body’s inner defenses. Then one day in the early
1880s, Metchnikoff straightened his spectacles, peered into his
microscope, and declared that he was watching a curative force in
action.
He was an outsider—a zoologist, not a physician. His theory of
immunity came under attack in Germany; a prominent French
scientist dubbed it “an oriental fairy tale.” How did Metchnikoff
become one of the founding fathers of immunology? And how did it
happen that a scientist who launched such a radical shift in human
consciousness was so thoroughly forgotten outside Russia?
Searching for answers, I started out with the adoring biography
by his wife Olga, Life of Elie Metchnikoff, as well as books and
articles written about him in Russia. But I wanted to form my own
opinion. I sought out Metchnikoff’s memoirs and letters and those by
his friends and foes. I followed his trail to Ukraine, riding for hours
on a vintage bus to Mechnikovo, the pastoral village where he had
grown up, which was renamed in his memory. At a library during a
trip to Moscow, I scrolled through the May 1945 microfilm of Pravda,
which reported on the celebrations of the centenary of his birth.
From the State Archive of the Russian Federation, I obtained reports
filed on him by the tsar’s secret police.
My initial intent was to write a book about an unjustly forgotten
scientist. Then something unexpected happened: Metchnikoff’s luck,
I realized, had suddenly changed. In the 2000s, during the years in
which I was rediscovering him, world science was rediscovering him
as well. His ideas are now making a surprising comeback. He fought
to leave his mark on the science of the twentieth century; instead,
he advanced the science of the twenty-first.
Shifting my quest from the past to the present, I sought to
understand this unusual reversal of fortune. What is Metchnikoff’s
true legacy? Is his research helping to rid humanity of disease, as he
had hoped? And what does modern science say about gut microbes
and longevity?
Throughout my searches, I wondered whether Metchnikoff
himself would have felt vindicated by his own remarkable revival.
Would he conclude that the fears he had on his deathbed were
unfounded? And would he see himself as a winner in his major
thrilling sight greeted his eyes through the microscope lens. Just as
he had predicted, masses of mobile cells inside the larvae had
gathered around the intruding thorns.
There was no doubt in his mind that the cells had rushed to the
larva’s defense. In the same manner, they might rush to swallow
another intruder, a disease-causing microbe.
The next step was almost too easy; he had no qualms about
extrapolating from starfish to humans. After all, for more than
twenty of his thirty-seven years, Metchnikoff had dealt with evolution
of species in one way or another. He had long ago reached the
conclusion that Darwin had been right. From headless mollusks to
brainy mammals, all life had evolved from a common ancestor.
His daring new hypothesis was this: in all living beings, humans
included, wandering cells eat up microbes, giving the organism
immunity against life-threatening disease. It is these cells that are
responsible for an organism’s healing power. Metchnikoff had
managed to observe and define a curative force, which physicians
had struggled to uncover since antiquity.
The first modern theory of immunity was born.
“Until then a zoologist, I suddenly became a pathologist,”
Metchnikoff wrote in the final paragraph of the Messina essay. This
essay, reprinted after his death in Stranitsy vospominanii (Pages of
Memoirs), a collection of his autobiographical writings, is quoted in
endless books and articles dealing with immunity. Paul de Kruif, in
his classic Microbe Hunters, pokes fun at the supposed ease with
which Metchnikoff interpreted his rose-thorn experiment. “It was like
that blinding light that bowled Paul over on his way to Damascus—in
one moment, in the most fantastical, you would say impossible flash
of a second, Metchnikoff changed his whole career. . . . Nothing
more was necessary (such a jumper at conclusions was he) to stamp
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je reviens en deuil ; j’avais un frère vivant, il est mort…
Je me plais à Montels : on y vit comme on veut, sans visites ni
ennuis du monde ; on entre, on sort, on se promène, sans nul
assujettissement ; puis la campagne est grande, toute diverse en
paysages, en toupes de montagnes, douces, couvertes de
châtaigniers ; cela plaît à voir et à parcourir. Si je devais quitter le
Cayla, c’est ici que je voudrais demeurer. Pour faire de ce château
une demeure agréable, il n’y aurait qu’à relever quelques ruines qui,
même telles quelles, sont toutes remplies d’intérêt. Quel charme n’a
pas ce vieux salon tout tapissé de vieux portraits de militaires,
d’hommes de robe et d’église, de belles dames, comme on n’en voit
plus, de mise et de beauté ? J’en ai remarqué une en toilette de bal
à côté d’un capucin méditant sur une tête de mort. De tout temps les
contrastes se sont touchés. Montels n’est plus autre chose partout,
dans la demeure et ses habitants, dans cette chambre appelée
chambre du cardinal pour avoir logé le cardinal de Bernis, toute
pleine à présent de pommes de terre.
Je ne suis pas étonnée que ce bel esprit, qui se connaissait en
jolies choses, eût choisi ce lieu pour sa maison de campagne, assez
près et assez loin de la ville, paysage parfaitement dessiné pour des
pastorales et des rêveries poétiques, si le cardinal rêvait encore. Qui
sait ? Qui sait en quel temps et en quel état on cesse d’être poëte ?
Celui-ci cependant, dans le cours de sa vie, se souvenant qu’il était
prêtre, eut repentir de ses chansons légères et fit faire des
recherches pour les détruire ; mais de la plume au vent ! Le mal ne
s’arrête pas comme on veut. Les épîtres à Chloé et à la Pompadour
sont restées, et nul ne sait, ou bien peu, que leur auteur a voulu les
mettre en cendre. Je tiens cela de mon père dont le père avait connu
l’Apollon cardinal.
Il y a encore ici dans un vieux tiroir une curieuse correspondance
sentimentale du fameux La Peyrouse avec Mlle de Vézian, sa
fiancée, devenue ensuite marquise de Sénégas, pendant sans doute
que le marin courait les mers. Il faut que je demande, pour les voir,
ces lettres à ma cousine. Précieuse découverte, débris du cœur de
La Pérouse, aussi curieuse que celle de son vaisseau. Mais qui
songe à cela ? Qui songe à chercher un grand homme dans son
intime ?
Voilà comme Montels occuperait son petit coin dans l’histoire.
Bien des lieux célèbres ont eu moins d’intérêt ; le tout, c’est de
savoir le faire ressortir, cet intérêt ; et ce n’est pas, ce me semble, ce
qui manque soit dans les hommes ou dans la nature. Que de trésors
sous une mousse et, si je veux, dans cette chambre inélégante et
glacée ! D’abord le soleil à mes pieds sous la table où je les chauffe
dans ce grand carré lumineux qui me vient de la fenêtre à côté…
Description interrompue par le départ annoncé au beau milieu de
ma page.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
[Sans date.] — Si je n’ai rien mis ici depuis huit jours, c’est que je
n’ai fait qu’écrire à Marie, écrire un journal intime, feuilles volantes
d’amitié qui s’en iront joncher son lit un beau moment à sa surprise,
et la pauvre malade aura plaisir à cela. Ce sont des riens, mais les
riens du cœur ont leur charme. J’ajoute à cela des livres qu’elle
m’avait prêtés et une carte de mon pays, de ces lieux qu’elle habite
tant par l’âme. Je veux les lui faire voir, et je jouis d’avance de ce
qu’elle va éprouver. Quant aux livres, j’ai peine à les renvoyer ; je ne
me sépare qu’à regret de ce qui fut emporté au départ, pages
empreintes d’adieux, de souvenirs de voyage, lues dans la diligence
de Bourges à Tours, quand je me trouvai assez seule pour pouvoir
lire. Si jamais je les revois, je les relirai encore en mémoire de ce
passé, de cet état d’âme où je me trouvais en regrets, en tristesse,
en craintes, en suspens entre la vie et la mort, roulant sur ce pauvre
malade, que j’allais voir, les pensées les plus déchirantes,
quelquefois les plus opposées ; car on ne peut s’empêcher
d’espérer, quoiqu’on ne voie pas trop où se tient l’espérance. Marie,
Marie, avec quels tristes pressentiments nous nous sommes
quittées ! J’ai toujours en souvenir ce dernier regard qu’elle me fit à
la fenêtre, enveloppée d’une mante noire. Elle m’apparut comme le
deuil en personne…
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Je vous aime
Beaucoup moins que mon Dieu, mais bien plus que moi-même.