Élie Metchnikoff
Discoverer of the Phagocyte · Zoologist & Immunologist · 1845–1916
The zoologist who discovered phagocytes by pushing a rose thorn into a starfish larva, and founded the cellular theory of immunity.
Who was Metchnikoff?
Élie Metchnikoff was born Ilya Ilyich Mechnikov near Kharkov and made his name as a zoologist of invertebrates long before he touched medicine. In Messina in 1882, watching transparent starfish larvae, he noticed mobile cells wandering about inside them and wondered what they were for. He fetched a thorn from a rose bush in the garden, pushed it into a larva, and by the next morning found those wandering cells clustered thickly around it. He named them phagocytes — eating cells — and argued that immunity is the work of living cells that engulf and digest invaders, and that inflammation is a defence rather than a disease. Most of Europe disagreed, holding that immunity lay in the fluids of the blood; Paul Ehrlich led the opposing view, and the two men argued for twenty years before sharing the Nobel Prize in 1908. Both were partly right. Pasteur gave him a laboratory in Paris when Russia had no place for him, and he spent the rest of his life at the Pasteur Institute — latterly convinced that bacteria in the large intestine slowly poison us, that this is what ageing is, and that soured milk would postpone it.
Major achievements
- Discovered phagocytes and phagocytosis, founding cellular immunity
- Showed that inflammation is a defensive response rather than a disorder
- Shared the 1908 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Paul Ehrlich
- Coined the terms phagocyte and macrophage
- Pioneered the comparative study of immunity across the animal kingdom
Life in brief
- 1845 — Born near Kharkov: In the Russian Empire; a zoologist from boyhood.
- 1882 — The rose thorn, Messina: Sees cells cluster around a thorn in a starfish larva.
- 1883 — Announces phagocytosis: Proposes that cells defend the body actively.
- 1888 — Joins the Pasteur Institute: Invited to Paris by Pasteur himself.
- 1892 — Publishes on inflammation: Argues it is a defence, not a disease.
- 1908 — Nobel Prize: Shared with Paul Ehrlich, his opponent of twenty years.
- 1907 — The Prolongation of Life: Argues gut bacteria cause ageing; promotes soured milk.
- 1916 — Dies in Paris: At the Institute, during the First World War.
Explore the life of Metchnikoff — five chapters
- A Difficult Young Man — Brilliance, grief, and two attempts on his own life
- The Rose Thorn — Messina, 1882
- Inflammation Is the Defence, Not the Disease — A reversal of two thousand years of medicine
- Cells Against Fluids — Twenty years of arguing with Ehrlich, and a shared prize
- Soured Milk and the Fear of Old Age — A great scientist pursuing a theory his evidence did not support
Read the five-chapter life of Élie Metchnikoff →
Where Metchnikoff appears in your course
Élie Metchnikoff has a genuine claim on 2 lessons of the Pearson Edexcel International GCSE science course built into Incandio:
- Immunity and Clotting — Biology: Statement 2.62 exists because of this man. In Messina in 1882 he noticed cells wandering about inside transparent starfish larvae, wondered what they were for, pushed a rose thorn from the garden into one, and next morning found those cells clustered thickly around it. He named them phagocytes and spent twenty years arguing that immunity is the work of cells that hunt.
- Excretion: Getting Rid of What You Made — Biology: In his later years Metchnikoff became convinced that bacteria in the large intestine release substances that poison us gradually, and that this slow self-poisoning IS ageing. He was wrong about the conclusion and ran far past his evidence, but the underlying instinct is this lesson's: waste that is not removed does harm, and an organism that cannot excrete is in serious trouble.
Begin
- Start a conversation with Metchnikoff — a dramatised, historically grounded AI portrayal
- Read the Historical Brief
- Explore the life of Metchnikoff — five chapters
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