The Man Who Blamed Aging on His Intestines
One day in late December 1899, Elie Metchnikoff, one of the world’s most famous biologists, woke up to discover he had found the key to immortality. That, at least, was what the popular French daily Le Matin announced on its front page that morning. A jubilant headline blared in block letters LONG LIVE LIFE!—DOCTOR METCHNIKOFF AND THE STRUGGLE AGAINST DEATH. Sub‐headings throughout the article, which dwelt on Metchnikoff’s new research on aging at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, were no less dramatic: A VISIT TO THE ALCHEMISTS ON RUE DUTOT—THE ELIXIR OF ETERNAL YOUTH—AT THE INSTITUTE OF MIRACLES—OLD AGE DEFEATED. A few days later, in an editorial on the prospects for the upcoming century, the paper gushed, “None of us should despair to see the year 2000! We’ll reach the age of the patriarchs, and Monsieur Metchnikoff will be damned only by heirs to fortunes.”
Before long, press around the world picked up news of the miracles being wrought on rue Dutot. The horrified Metchnikoff started receiving letters from the elderly in France and elsewhere begging him to help them not to die. “Metchnikoff is really annoyed by the noise journalists make around his name,” Metchnikoff’s assistant Jules Bordet wrote to his wife in Belgium. “It’s a bit of his own fault, he should have chucked them out more vigorously.”
But chucking people out was out of character for Metchnikoff. Journalists, his comrades‐in‐arms in the sacred mission of popularizing science, had always appreciated the ease with which they could knock on his door at any time, be it to discuss his own work or that of scientists elsewhere. So when the sensational headlines began to appear, Metchnikoff countered the reports by granting ever more interviews. In February 1900, he pleaded with a Los Angeles Times reporter, “I’ve been a victim of the hasty journalists. I work and hope, but I promise nothing. I regret very much—please say that I regret very much—all the talk that has arisen about my researches.”
etchnikoff had gained worldwide fame as the first modern scientist to claim that human beings have inner curative powers, later to be called the immune system. He had discovered the first immune mechanism known to science: mobile cells he called phagocytes, which swallow microbes and
