- Person
- Élie Metchnikoff
- Lived
- 1845–1916
- Field
- Immunology, microbiology
- From
- Russian-French
The story
Ilya Mechnikov, known in France as Élie Metchnikoff, was born in 1845 near Kharkov in the Russian Empire to a Jewish mother, Emilia Nevakhovich, and a father who was an officer of the Imperial Guard. Trained as a zoologist, he studied how the embryos of sea creatures develop. In 1882, after resigning his professorship in Odessa amid political turmoil, he set up a private laboratory in Messina, Sicily, and began studying the transparent larvae of starfish, in which he could watch living cells move.
He wondered whether those wandering cells might defend the animal against intruders. To test the idea he took small thorns from a tangerine tree, which had been decorated as a Christmas tree for the children, and introduced them into the larvae. The next morning the thorns were surrounded by the mobile cells. Metchnikoff knew that when animals with blood vessels suffer inflammation, white blood cells leave the vessels and gather at the site. He realised that they might be doing the same thing: engulfing and digesting bacteria that enter the body.
The zoologist Carl Claus suggested the name phagocytes, or devouring cells, and Metchnikoff presented his theory in Odessa in 1883. He gathered more evidence, showing for example that phagocytes in the water flea Daphnia attack invading fungal spores. In 1888 Louis Pasteur gave him a laboratory at the new Pasteur Institute in Paris, where he worked for the rest of his life. For years many scientists insisted that the body fought infection only through substances in the blood, but Metchnikoff defended cellular immunity until it was accepted.
In 1908 he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Paul Ehrlich in recognition of their work on immunity. The phagocytes he discovered, now known as neutrophils and macrophages, are the first line of the body’s defence, and he is honoured as the father of innate immunity.
Why it matters
Metchnikoff’s discovery founded the study of the immune cells that protect everyone from infection, knowledge used in medicine every day, from blood counts to the care of patients with weakened immunity.
About Élie Metchnikoff
Ukrainian-born zoologist (Ilya Mechnikov) who discovered that white blood cells eat invading germs, founding cellular immunology, and pioneered the ideas behind probiotics. Nobel Prize 1908.
Sources
- Ilya Mechnikov, Biographical NobelPrize.org
- Ilya Ilyich Mechnikov (Élie Metchnikoff) (1845–1916) The Embryo Project Encyclopedia, Arizona State University
- Élie Metchnikoff Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.