Ilya mechnikov (1845 – 1916) The Nobel Prize Winner

Ilya Ilyich Mechnikov was born on May 16, 1845, in a village near Kharkoff in Russia. He was the son of an officer of the Imperial Guard, who was a landowner in the Ukraine steppes. His mother, née Nevakhowitch, was of Jewish origin.

Mechnikov went to school at Kharkoff and was passionately interested in natural history, on which he used to give lectures to his small brothers and to other children. He was at that time especially interested in botany and geology. When he left school he went to the University of Kharkoff to study natural sciences, and worked there so hard that he was able to complete the four year course in two years. Graduating at Kharkoff, he went to the University of Giessen. Subsequently he went to the University of Göttingen and the Munich Academy. While he was at Giessen, he discovered, in 1865, intracellular digestion in one of the flatworms, an observation which was to influence his later discoveries.

In 1867 he returned to Russia, having been appointed an associate professor at

the new University of Odessa and from there he went to take up a similar appointment at the University of St. Petersburg.

At St. Petersburg he met his first wife, Ludmilla Feodorovitch, who suffered from tuberculosis so severe that she had to be carried to church in a chair for the wedding. For five years Mechnikov did all he could to save her life, but she died on April 20, 1873. Broken by this loss, troubled by weak eyesight and heart troubles and by difficulties in the University, Mechnikov became, at this time, so pessimistic that he tried to take his own life by swallowing a large dose of opium; but, fortunately for himself and for the world, he did not die. It was in Odessa, in fact, that he met his second wife, Olga, whom he married in 1875. In 1880 his second wife had a severe attack of typhoid fever and, although she did not die, Mechnikov, whose health was still poor, again tried to take his own life. This time, however, he decided to do this by means of the scientific experiment of inoculating himself with relapsing fever to find out whether it was transmissible by the blood. The attack of relapsing fever that followed was severe, but it did not kill him.

After his recovery from this disease, Mechnikov went to Messina to continue his work on comparative embryology, and it was here that he discovered the phenomenon of phagocytosis with which his name will always be associated. Returning to Odessa, Mechnikov visited Vienna on the way and explained his ideas to Claus, Professor of Zoology and it was Claus who suggested the term phagocyte for the mobile cells which act in this way. Ultimately in 1883, Mechnikov gave, at Odessa, his first paper on phagocytosis. Apart from its fundamental importance in immunology, the discovery had a marked influence on Mechnikov himself. It completely changed his outlook on life; he abandoned his pessimistic philosophy and determined to find further proof of his hypothesis.

During this period Mechnikov had been appointed Director of an Institute established in 1886 in Odessa. In 1888 he left Odessa and went to Paris to work under the guidance of Pasteur. Pasteur gave him a laboratory and an appointment in the Pasteur Institute. Here he remained for the rest of his life.

In 1908 he was awarded, together with Paul Ehrlich, the Nobel Prize for Medicine. Mechnikov received many distinctions, among which were the honorary D. Sc. of the University of Cambridge, the Copley Medal of the Royal British Medical Society, the honorary memberships of the Academy of Medicine in Paris, and the Academies of Sciences and of Medicine in St. Petersburg. In addition, he was a corresponding member of the Swedish Medical Society.

From 1913 onwards Mechnikov began to suffer from heart attacks and, although he recovered from the distress which the 1914-1918 War caused him, he died on July 16, 1916.