Elie Metchnikoff — zoologist, microbiologist (nobel) with roots in the Russian Empire
Ilya Ilyich Mechnikov, known in France as Élie Metchnikoff, was born in May 1845 (most sources give 15 or 16 May) in the village of Ivanovka in the Kharkov Governorate of the Russian Empire, now in the Kharkiv region of Ukraine. His father, Ilya Ivanovich Mechnikov, an officer of the Imperial Guard, came of a noble family of Moldavian descent; his mother, Emilia Nevakhovich, came from a Jewish family.
He entered the Kharkov Lycée in 1856 and Kharkov University at seventeen, graduating in 1864, then went to Germany to continue his training in biology, including at Giessen. Returning in 1867, he took degrees in Odessa and St Petersburg and taught at both universities, and in 1870 became professor of zoology and comparative anatomy at Odessa, where his discoveries in embryology made his name.
In 1882, amid the political turmoil that followed the assassination of Alexander II, he resigned from Odessa and set up a private laboratory in Messina, in Sicily. There, watching mobile cells gather round foreign matter in the transparent larvae of starfish, he arrived at the idea of phagocytosis, the engulfing of invading particles by specialised cells, which he called phagocytes. He returned to Odessa and in 1886 became head of a bacteriological station set up to administer Louis Pasteur's rabies vaccine, but difficulties there led him to leave.
In 1888 he went to Paris; Pasteur gave him a laboratory and, when the Pasteur Institute opened, a post there, and he became its deputy director in 1904. He remained at the Institute for the rest of his life. His Immunity in Infectious Diseases (1901) set out the cellular theory of immunity, long disputed by the German school led by Paul Ehrlich. In 1908 the two men shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their work on immunity. In later years he studied ageing and the bacteria of the gut, recommended sour milk in the diet, and wrote The Nature of Man (1903) and The Prolongation of Life (1907).
He received an honorary degree from Cambridge and the Copley Medal of the Royal Society, and was a member of the Academy of Sciences of St Petersburg. He died in Paris in July 1916, aged seventy-one; his ashes are kept at the Pasteur Institute. Odessa University now bears his name.
Tracing the roots — Ivanovka, Kharkov Governorate (now Kharkiv Oblast, Ukraine)
Born in Ivanovka, Kharkov Governorate, in 1845 to Ilya Ivanovich Mechnikov, an officer of the Imperial Guard, and Emilia Nevakhovich, from a Jewish family, Metchnikoff worked in Odessa and left for Paris in 1888 after difficulties at the Odessa rabies vaccine institute.
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Ivanovka, Kharkov Governorate (now Kharkiv Oblast, Ukraine). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.
A career defined by ambition
"The intestinal flora is the key to longevity."