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Return to Old News home pageby John Risser
In the early 1860s, when Elie Metchnikoff was still a student at the University
of Kharkov in Russia, he predicted that he would soon win fame as a scientific
genius.
"I have zeal and ability," Metchnikoff said. "I am naturally
talented. I am ambitious to become a distinguished scientist."
Young Metchnikoff regarded himself as an expert on almost any question.
In the coffee houses where he sat up late most nights, drinking endless
cups of tea, he was known as a highly opinionated fellow.
Were women as intelligent as men? According to young Metchnikoff, the average
woman was just as intelligent as the average man. However, no woman could
become a true genius, like himself.
Did God exist? No, said Metchnikoff, with an air of certainty that earned
him the nickname of "God-Is-Not."
Metchnikoff's major field of study was zoology. Whenever he dissected a
worm in the university laboratory, he tried to make some important scientific
discovery that would demonstrate his brilliance to the world. In The Microbe
Hunters, Paul de Kruif wrote:
Metchnikoff was always trying to get ahead of himself. He sent papers to
scientific journals while he was still in his teens; he wrote these papers
frantically a few hours after he had trained his microscope on some bugs
or beetles; the next day he would look at them again, and find that what
he had been so certain of, was not quite the same now. Hastily he wrote
to the editors of a scientific journal: "Please do not publish the
manuscript I sent you yesterday. I find I have made a mistake." At
other times he became furious when his ideas were turned down by the editors.
"The world does not appreciate me!" he cried, and he went to his
room, ready to die.
Metchnikoff possessed a photographic memory that allowed him to earn top
grades almost effortlessly. After graduating from the University of Kharkov
in two years instead of the customary four, he pursued graduate studies
in zoology at various universities in Germany, Russia, and Italy. He did
not stay long at any one university. Wherever he studied, he got into furious
quarrels with his professors and left in a huff to enroll at some other
school.
As a graduate student, Metchnikoff claimed credit for one scientific breakthrough:
he discovered that certain worms can not only reproduce sexually, but can
also produce clones of themselves by an asexual process. Unfortunately for
Metchnikoff, who was outraged, one of his professors took credit for the
discovery.
In addition to searching for some great discovery in the field of biology,
Metchnikoff also tried to revolutionize modern philosophy with his original
"theory of scientific optimism." The basic tenet of this doctrine
was that humanity was evolving into a morally superior species, thanks to
Darwinian natural selection. Metchnikoff's new philosophy made little impression
on the world, but he found his own logic convincing. Whenever he felt like
committing suicide because no one else appreciated his great ideas, Metchnikoff
thought about his "theory of scientific optimism," and was inspired
to live.
In 1868, when Metchnikoff was twenty-three years old, he finally met somebody
who seemed to admire him as much as he admired himself. Her name was Ludmilla.
Unfortunately for Metchnikoff, Ludmilla fell sick with tuberculosis shortly
before their scheduled wedding. The ceremony was held anyway, with the bride
in a wheelchair.
After his marriage, Metchnikoff tried to settle down as a university instructor,
but his life was disrupted as his wife's health continued to deteriorate.
When Ludmilla died in 1872, Elie Metchnikoff was so upset that he tried
to kill himself with morphine. He miscalculated and merely put himself to
sleep. Waking up in his bedroom in the middle of the night, Metchnikoff
immediately prepared a larger dose of the drug. Before drinking it, however,
he happened to glance out his bedroom window and found himself distracted
by the sight of a cloud of mayflies swarming around a candle in a lantern.
"These insects live only a few hours!" he thought. "How can
Darwin's theory of the survival of the fittest be applied to them?"
So Metchnikoff decided to live, in order to study this question.
A few weeks after his wife's funeral, Metchnikoff found a new admirer, a
teenaged student named Olga, who had a properly worshipful attitude towards
him. "He is so pale and seems so sad," Olga said of her mentor.
"His appearance is not unlike that of Christ."
Metchnikoff married Olga, then worked uneventfully as a professor of zoology
at the University of Odessa, in Russia, for seven years. His marriage was
childless, but apparently happy.
In 1881, upset by political turmoil on campus, Metchnikoff made another
of his periodic suicide attempts. He decided to combine his suicide with
an experiment to test Louis Pasteur's germ theory of disease.
At that time, Pasteur had not yet conclusively demonstrated that bacteria
cause serious diseases in human beings. So far, Pasteur had demonstrated
only that bacteria cause acne; he had found that the pus from pimples was
full of bacteria.
To prove that germs can cause fatal diseases in humans, Metchnikoff resolved
to infect himself with germs from the blood of a patient dying from a fever.
Metchnikoff scratched the patient's arm and his own arm. He then rubbed
the patient's infected blood into his own wound.
To his delight, Metchnikoff's experiment was a success; he caught the fever.
His suicide attempt was, however, a failure. After a very painful illness,
Metchnikoff recovered.
Still unhappy, Metchnikoff quit his professorship and retired with his wife
to one of her family's villas near Messina, on the island of Sicily. There
he studied the process of digestion in the local starfish and sea anemones.
Metchnikoff later recalled:
I was resting from the shock of the events which provoked my resignation
from the university and indulging enthusiastically in researches in the
splendid setting of the Straits of Messina.
One day when everyone in the household had gone to a circus to see some
extraordinary performing apes, I remained alone with my microscope, observing
the life of the mobile cells of a transparent starfish larva, when a new
thought suddenly flashed across my brain.
He was studying mobile cells within the starfish--cells which were part
of the animal that contained them, but which were free to wander independently
through the entire starfish. Their means of locomotion was to flow from
one location to another, like amoebas.
Metchnikoff knew that similar cells existed in the blood of humans: the
pus from human pimples contained wandering cells, as well as bacteria. Metchnikoff
thought that the mobile cells must play some role in digestion.
To observe digestion in a sea anemone, Metchnikoff fed the creature a few
grains of bright red dye, which he squirted into its mouth-like opening.
He watched with delight as the free-flowing cells in the larva congregated
around the dye, and then ate it up.
Suddenly, it occurred to Metchnikoff that what he was witnessing was not
digestion. The dye was not food. To the sea anemone, the dye was probably
a mild poison.
The action of the mobile cells must be defensive, Metchnikoff thought. He
immediately leaped to the conclusion that mobile cells must protect all
animals, and all humans, from the attacks of harmful bacteria.
If Metchnikoff was correct, he had explained how people are able to survive
in a world full of disease germs. He knew, of course, that he had proved
nothing; he did not have any evidence to support his theory. He was jumping
to a wild conclusion--and yet he felt he was right: strange little creatures
beyond our awareness were fighting our microscopic enemies in the recesses
of our bodies.
Metchnikoff wrote:
I felt so excited that I began striding up and down the room and even went
to the seashore to collect my thoughts.
I said to myself that, if my supposition were true, a splinter introduced
into the body of a starfish larva, devoid of blood vessels or a nervous
system, should soon be surrounded by mobile cells as is to be observed in
a man who runs a splinter into his finger.
Metchnikoff knew that, when a man fails to remove a splinter from his skin,
pus forms around the splinter. He knew that this pus contains white blood
corpuscles--human mobile cells--as well as the bacteria that Pasteur had
found in the pus from pimples.
Metchnikoff believed that if he inserted splinters into a starfish, wandering
cells from within the starfish would move to the wounded area of the starfish
in order to protect it. He wrote:
I fetched a few rose thorns and introduced them at once under the skin of
some beautiful starfish larvae as transparent as water.
I was too excited to sleep that night in the expectation of the results
of my experiment, and very early the next morning I ascertained that it
had fully succeeded.
Without further ado, Metchnikoff rushed off to Vienna to announce his great
discovery that mobile cells provide immunity from disease. He did not have
a shred of real evidence to prove his theory, and had never seen a mobile
cell eat one bacterium. Nevertheless, he published a paper in which he called
the mobile cells "phagocytes," from Greek words meaning "devouring
cells."
Luckily for Metchnikoff, his guesses turned out to be correct. He eventually
found real evidence that phagocytes provide immunity in little aquatic creatures
called water fleas. The water fleas are transparent, so Metchnikoff could
look right through them with a lens.
Metchnikoff noticed one of his water fleas being invaded by spores of yeast.
Then he saw the mobile cells of the water flea, its phagocytes, flow towards
the yeasts. Like a miniature army defending the water flea, the phagocytes
engulfed the yeasts, melted them, and digested them.
Metchnikoff saw this defensive process work successfully in many water fleas.
He also saw that, when the phagocytes were slow to attack invading yeasts,
the yeasts multiplied inside the water flea until they poisoned and killed
it.
Elie Metchnikoff's discovery of the phagocyte marked the beginning of the
science of immunology. Thereafter, the rest of the world shared Metchnikoff's
conviction that he was a scientific genius. He became far less miserable
than before, and attempted suicide less often.
He became an administrator at the Pasteur Institute in 1888, and eventually
became its director. He published a book promoting his philosophy of scientific
optimism, and another book on his theory that a man will live to be a hundred
if he eats enough yogurt. His contribution to the development of microbiology
was recognized when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for physiology in 1908.
Despite eating large quantities of yogurt, Metchnikoff died at the age of
seventy-one in 1916.
SOURCES:
Microbe Hunters, by Paul DeKruif, Blue Ribbon, New York, 1926.
Major Prophets of Today, by Edward E. Slosson, Books for Libraries, Freeport,
N. Y., 1968.
The Thorn in the Starfish: the Immune System and How it Works. by Robert
S. Desowitz. W.W. Norton & Co. New York. 1987.
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