Pod Insights Throughline History of the Self: Aging About this episode Defeating old age? In 1899, Elie Metchnikoff woke up in Paris to learn he had done just that. At least, that's what the newspaper headlines said. Before long he was inundated with mail from people begging him to help them live forever. The only problem? He didn't know how to do it.
At the time, Metchnikoff was one of the world's most famous scientists. And he believed aging was a disease he could cure. He dedicated his life to that quest, spending his days interviewing centenarians, pulling gray hair out of colleagues and old dogs, and boiling strawberries — all in the pursuit of eternal youth. If you've ever had yogurt for breakfast, you likely have Metchnikoff to thank. (This episode first ran as The Man Who Cured Aging https://www.npr.org/2024/01/25/1198908457/the-man-who-cured-aging)
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0:26 Speaker 01 Around 200 B.C., China's first emperor, Qin Shi Huang, feared death so badly that he sent an alchemist on voyages across the sea to search for a magic elixir that would give him immortality.
0:48 Speaker 01 After the alchemist disappeared at sea, the legend says the emperor took things into his own hands and died after drinking what he thought was a cure.
1:03 Speaker 01 Around 200 years later, another legend was born.
1:09 Speaker 01 A holy grail that was thought to hold life-restoring powers for anyone who drank from it.
1:18 Speaker 01 There was the philosopher's stone, the fountain of youth.
1:25 Speaker 01 And then...
1:28 Speaker 01 In late December of 1899, a scientist named Eli Metchnikoff woke up in Paris to learn that he had done it. He had found the secret to eternal life.
1:41 Speaker 02 The French morning newspaper Le Matin carried a huge headline in large block letters all across the front page, and it said, "Vive la vie! Long live life."
1:54 Speaker 01 Underneath that headline, it said things like:
1:59 Speaker 01 "The elixir of eternal youth." "The institute of miracles."
2:06 Speaker 01 "Old age defeated."
2:09 Speaker 03 None of us should despair to see that your two thousand will reach the age of the patriarchs, and Monsieur Metchnikoff will be damned only by heirs or fortunes.
2:25 Speaker 01 Eli Metchnikoff had captured the world's attention.
2:33 Speaker 01 For millennia, people had tried to evade death, seeking cures in things like mercury, gold, powders, liquids. But now, they had a new tool: science. And it was miraculous. There were new vaccines, x-rays had just been invented. You could now see what had once been invisible. And Metchnikoff had helped to make that happen.
3:05 Speaker 02 He was very famous. He was one of the most famous scientists in the world.
3:10 Speaker 01 Eli Metchnikoff was hardcore. The man drank cholera in the name of science. He injected himself with disease, and he tested the body's power and its limits. Later in his career, his work on the immune system would win him a Nobel Prize. When the world was sick, Eli Metchnikoff tried to cure it, and he made sure people knew.
3:36 Speaker 02 He loved the journalists. He never turned them away, and they loved him even more than he loved them. And they followed him around, and they took down his every word.
3:46 Speaker 01 And his message was clear.
3:49 Speaker 02 He thought that a solution to everything was science. So of course, science was going to solve aging as well.
4:00 Speaker 04 Aging is a disease that should be treated like any other.
4:06 Speaker 01 No one had studied aging scientifically before. And here was this famous scientist saying he wanted to take it on. But Metchnikoff didn't just want to study aging. He wanted to cure it.
4:20 Speaker 02 This became for him like his new mission.
4:23 Speaker 04 Science alone can lead suffering humanity into the right path.
4:27 Speaker 02 Free the world from this terrible affliction.
4:31 Speaker 01 And the world ate it up.
4:34 Speaker 02 Entire sacks of letters that piled up in the mailroom was stuffed with letters from people who didn't want to die.
4:44 Speaker 05 Nobody likes to die.
4:48 Speaker 05 Nobody likes to see their friends and family die.
4:54 Speaker 05 So we want to extend the lifespan as much as possible.
4:59 Speaker 06 People nowadays want to remain ageless.
5:02 Speaker 01 We can delay aging.
5:04 Speaker 07 It's one of the foundational questions in science.
5:06 Speaker 01 We can stop aging.
5:08 Speaker 07 How long can we live?
5:09 Speaker 05 We keep searching.
5:11 Speaker 06 What is exactly what we're looking for? I don't know what I want to do. Living to 200? Are we looking to living to, you know, 95 with our senses and being active and in control?
5:24 Speaker 05 I think the most important thing to me is maintaining my mobility. I would love to like rent a big house. I think I want to travel more. Traveling as much as I can.
5:34 Speaker 07 More time to myself. We all know that winter is coming for us. I have about 20, 25 years left. The question is when? And can we push it out as much as possible? People have been talking about it for thousands of years. It's not a new question, it's an old question.
6:02 Speaker 01 Since the beginning of human civilization, people have been obsessed with staying young, even living forever. Today, that obsession is tied up with media, medicine, and money. So I got this draw on Amazon and it literally is the best. We spend billions of dollars on anti-aging products. It doesn't cause wrinkles, you can easily drink out from the top of it. We're told to look younger. The top 10 celebrities who have aged badly. We question whether older people are fit to lead.
6:33 Speaker 00 Why do voters vote for older politicians and then turn around and question their mental fitness?
6:39 Speaker 01 But what if these are the wrong questions? Is aging something we even need to cure? And what does it mean if we can't? I'm Ramtin Arablouei.
6:50 Speaker 05 I'm Randa Abdel Fattah.
6:51 Speaker 01 On this episode of Throughline, we're not going to answer the question of aging, but we are going to tell you the story of someone who tried.
7:00 Speaker 05 It's part of our series, History of the Self, where we explore the deeply personal experiences that make history.
7:08 Speaker 01 Coming up, our producer Devon Katayama tells the story of Eli Meshnikov.
7:17 Speaker 06 Hello, my name is Subhash Chakrabarti. I'm calling from Austin, Texas, and you are listening to True Mind NPR.
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8:54 Speaker 05 Part One: This Love of Life.
9:00 Speaker 05 The country is neither beautiful nor rich.
9:04 Speaker 06 Steps, helix, covered with low grasses and wild warm wood.
9:10 Speaker 06 A poor village, meagre vegetation, no river. The whole impression is a melancholy one.
9:19 Speaker 04 In the middle of the 19th century, Ilya Ivanovich and his wife and children left Saint Petersburg, Russia for the countryside.
9:29 Speaker 06 But what boundless space, what soft silver-gray colorway. And in the mornings and evenings, what fresh, cool air.
9:39 Speaker 04 It was here, on a little slice of land outside the main village, that they would welcome their fifth child into the world.
9:47 Speaker 06 Though they wished to have no more children. One more child was born on the 16th May, 1845. Eli Metchnikoff.
9:59 Speaker 04 These descriptions of Eli Metchnikoff's early life are from the biography his wife Olga wrote about him.
10:05 Speaker 06 Fair and slender, with silky hair and a diaphanous pink-and-white complexion. He had small gray-blue eyes, full of kindliness and sparkle.
10:16 Speaker 05 He had a few brothers and sisters, and out of all of them, he was probably the most curious.
10:22 Speaker 06 He was so restless that he went by the name of Queek Silver. He always wished to see everything, to know everything, and found his way everywhere.
10:33 Speaker 05 As a kid, he was always chasing bugs and, you know, looking at what bugs do.
10:39 Speaker 06 He could only be kept quiet when his curiosity was awakened by the observation of some natural object, such as an insect or a butterfly.
10:49 Speaker 05 Then he would invite all of his siblings and cousins for a lecture in natural history, and he would actually pay them out of his pocket money to come and listen to his lectures.
11:03 Speaker 04 This is Lina Zeldivich. She's currently a science and medical journalist in New York City.
11:09 Speaker 05 But she grew up in the former Soviet Union, where Eli Metchnikoff was a household name. So I learned that name at a very young age. She remembers hearing about his famous discoveries, the same way you might have learned about Albert Einstein's E equals mc squared. He was like, you know, a cherished name, a big name.
11:30 Speaker 05 A couple of research institutions were named after him. We definitely knew about him growing up.
11:36 Speaker 05 Metchnikoff was born in a time and place when medicine was only just starting to modernize. The human body wasn't really understood, and diseases like cholera and typhoid were really scary. Many doctors still believed in bloodletting and would actually treat patients with toxic substances like mercury and lead. So medical care itself was basically synonymous with suffering. From a very young age, I think he had this desire to alleviate human suffering. And that's how he sort of found his way into biological research. So Metchnikoff grows up to become a zoologist, and he couldn't have picked a better time because when he was just 14 years old, a new theory rocked the scientific world:
12:20 Speaker 05 Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.
12:24 Speaker 02 The main goal at the time of many scientists and of him as well was to test Darwin's idea that all life on Earth came from the same common ancestor.
12:35 Speaker 05 And he dedicated his early career to researching that theory.
12:42 Speaker 02 When he was in his late 30s, he traveled to Italy, to the island of Sicily, to study marine animals. And he was studying the larva of starfish.
12:54 Speaker 05 This is Lubo Wackonski. She's a science writer at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel.
13:00 Speaker 02 And I've written a book called "Immunity: How Eli Metchnikoff Changed the Course of Modern Medicine."
13:07 Speaker 05 This trip to Sicily would change everything for Metchnikoff. He and his wife were staying by the seaside in a car. Cottage overlooking the bright blue Messina Strait. The strait was home to all sorts of marine creatures. And while his wife went out to explore Sicily, Metchnikoff would spend long days holed up in the cottage, staring at jars filled with seawater and tiny organisms. One day, he had his eye pressed up against his microscope, peering inside these minuscule starfish larvae.
13:43 Speaker 02 And in the larvae, he saw mobile cells.
13:47 Speaker 05 These were cells that wandered inside the larvae, gobbling up food and other particles. Metchnikoff had seen these cells in action before, but that day, watching them go about their business, it struck him.
14:04 Speaker 02 He came up with the idea that maybe this is a defensive force of the organism.
14:10 Speaker 04 Sensing that my hunch concealed something particularly interesting, I became so excited that I began striding up and down the room.
14:19 Speaker 02 He performed an experiment. It's a very famous experiment in immunology, where he inserted thorns into these larvae.
14:28 Speaker 05 If the cells attacked the thorn as a foreign invader, his theory would be correct.
14:34 Speaker 02 And he saw that the cells indeed ganged up on the thorns. This was for him evidence of his theory that they were there to protect the larvae.
14:44 Speaker 05 Watching this unfold through his microscope, his mind was blown.
14:49 Speaker 02 In fact, this was the first material evidence of inner healing forces in science.
14:57 Speaker 05 The invisible had become visible. Metchnikoff wasn't the first person to observe this healing force, but he was the first person to define it as an immune response. This was the work that would later earn him a Nobel Prize.
15:11 Speaker 02 The idea that the body has inner powers that can be studied and enhanced and understood. I mean, that's enormous. It just turned everything around.
15:30 Speaker 05 Around the turn of the century, while Metchnikoff was consumed by his work on immunity, another question started to nag at him.
15:38 Speaker 02 He was living in Paris and working at the Pasteur Institute.
15:41 Speaker 05 The Pasteur Institute was home to the miracle makers of the day, scientists who were researching vaccination or figuring out what caused plague.
15:50 Speaker 02 He was in his mid-50s. He started having kidney trouble. And he began to worry about his own aging.
16:01 Speaker 02 And he also began to fear death.
16:03 Speaker 04 Our strong will to live runs counter to the infirmities of old age and the shortness of life. That's greatest disharmony of human nature.
16:15 Speaker 05 Life expectancy at the time was around the mid-40s, so he must have had a growing sense of his own mortality. But he wasn't just concerned about himself. In his mind, aging was one of the greatest problems facing humankind. The fact that we all grow older and that aging meant sickness until death.
16:35 Speaker 02 And he was appalled to discover how little was known about aging and that there was no systematic study of aging. There were textbooks about diseases of old age, but not about old age itself.
16:51 Speaker 05 And Metchnikoff comes up with this theory, an idea that would stay with him throughout his entire life.
16:59 Speaker 02 His hope was that if people live long enough, they will develop this death instinct.
17:04 Speaker 05 The death instinct.
17:08 Speaker 04 This instinct must be accompanied by marvelous sensations better than any other we are capable of experiencing.
17:16 Speaker 02 Death instinct would mean that people would be happy to die after living a long and healthy lives.
17:23 Speaker 04 Perhaps the anxious search for the purpose of human life is nothing but a vague yearning for this anticipation of natural death.
17:33 Speaker 02 He went around looking for this death instinct.
17:37 Speaker 05 He became so obsessed with figuring out how older people felt as they approached. ...death that he would literally chase the elderly down.
17:45 Speaker 02 Sainte-Nerians made it into the newspapers. So whenever he would see an article about an old person, he rushed to meet them. And he wanted to ask them, you know, about if they wanted to die.
18:00 Speaker 06 So this is late 19th century. We're going through a transformation from the agrarian economic system to the industrial economic system.
18:10 Speaker 05 This is Carol Haber. She's a professor and dean emerita of Tulane University in the School of Liberal Arts.
18:17 Speaker 06 I was trained as a medical and social historian, and I focus largely on the history of aging.
18:24 Speaker 05 Carol says she doesn't think there was ever a time when old age was seen as something wonderful, that everyone respected. But around the time Metchnikoff turned his attention to aging, there was a cultural shift happening in how people viewed it.
18:39 Speaker 06 If you look at the late 19th century, the image of the old person is hunched over with a cane, sitting in a rocking chair. It's pretty negative.
18:50 Speaker 05 At that time, the Industrial Revolution was changing how families lived and worked. And in this work revolution, the elderly were getting left behind.
18:59 Speaker 06 You had the feeling that there wasn't this basis of support and that old people were going to end up in what they called the industrial scrap heap. They couldn't keep up. They couldn't learn new skills. And so they were going to become oxalensis.
19:18 Speaker 05 Western society's view, whether it was true or not, was that the elderly weren't compatible with the increasingly fast-paced world. Caring for the elderly came to be seen as a burden. Many elderly people ended up living the rest of their days in a hospital. And that's exactly where Metchnikoff went to find them.
19:42 Speaker 02 He went to this large French hospital, La Salpetriere.
19:48 Speaker 05 La Salpetriere was an infamous hospital in Paris. It had long doubled as a psychiatric ward. And a home for the elderly.
19:59 Speaker 02 And most of them were poor because, you know, obviously, more wealthy elderly wouldn't make it there.
20:05 Speaker 05 For a lot of Parisians, it was a dark, distant presence looming over the city. Inside its imposing brick walls was a massive sprawling complex that for centuries had been a place of squalor and suffering. A famous French neurologist referred to it as "le Versailles de la douleur", the Versailles of pain.
20:27 Speaker 02 Probably must have been quite a sad place, you know, where all these people were brought to die and there was not much that could really be done for them.
20:36 Speaker 05 But it was the perfect laboratory for Metchnikoff.
20:40 Speaker 02 He went around asking them what they wanted and he was hoping to find the death instinct. And he was really disappointed because even the sick old people, they didn't want to die, they wanted to get better.
20:54 Speaker 04 I discovered that one and all felt as if they were continually being threatened by death, as if they were convicts awaiting the day of execution. At the Selpetreier, the great ambition of women of eighty is to live to one hundred, and the desire to live is almost universal.
21:13 Speaker 05 Even in a miserable place like Selpetreier, people wanted to live longer.
21:18 Speaker 04 What is this love of life that makes death so terrible?
21:25 Speaker 02 He developed a whole philosophy that there was this big disharmony in the world, you know, in nature, between the shortness of human life and people's desire to live.
21:39 Speaker 05 Metchnikoff came to believe that aging was a disease, and he was sure that science could cure it. He envisioned a utopic future where medicine could prolong life up to 150 years. At that age, he thought the death instinct would finally appear. So he went all in.
22:02 Speaker 02 This became for him like his new mission to free the world from this, you know, this terrible affliction.
22:14 Speaker 02 Coming up, Mechnikoff heads back to the lab with a new mission: to extend human life to 150 years.
22:39 Speaker 01 Hello, this is Nancy Smith, and I'm in Kiel, Germany. You're listening to Throughline from NPR. It's a great show, I love it. Keep up the good work. Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.
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23:50 Speaker 05 Part Two. Trusting His Gut.
24:03 Speaker 01 In his twenties, Eli Mechnikov had been visited by death.
24:07 Speaker 05 His first wife died of tuberculosis.
24:13 Speaker 05 It's a disease that kills you slowly.
24:19 Speaker 05 You can basically watch your loved one wither away.
24:28 Speaker 05 Day after day, month after month.
24:33 Speaker 05 They traveled to places with better climate, milder winters, sunnier places, and nothing helped, and she eventually died.
24:43 Speaker 01 This sent Metchnikoff into a deep depression. And then, a decade later, he went through it again.
24:51 Speaker 05 His second wife contracted typhoid fever, and it looked like she could die. And so he inoculated himself with some kind of a tick-borne disease, thinking that they will die together.
25:08 Speaker 05 But neither one of them died.
25:15 Speaker 01 And this changed everything for Metchnikoff.
25:21 Speaker 06 After his recovery, he had a renaissance of vital intensity. The life instinct developed in him in a high degree. His health became flourishing, his energy and power for work greater than ever, and the pessimism of his youth began to pale before the optimistic dawn of his maturity.
25:42 Speaker 01 Fast forward a couple of decades. It's the early 1900s. The now-famous Metchnikoff set out to pioneer the study of aging and cure it. He wants people to be able to live happy and healthy until they're ready to die.
25:58 Speaker 04 The purpose of human existence lies in going through a normal cycle of life, leading to a loss of the life instinct and a painless old age, bringing about a reconciliation with death.
26:13 Speaker 01 By now, he's a superstar at the Pasteur Institute, which was one of the most prestigious science facilities in the world at the time.
26:21 Speaker 03 It's sort of a scientist's dream. He has lab assistants, facilities, all the resources he could imagine at his fingertips. And he gets to work.
26:30 Speaker 02 His lab gradually filled up with the old animals of all sorts.
26:36 Speaker 03 There are mice and rats and geese and cats and dogs. There's this eighty-seven-year-old turtle and a seventy-year-old parrot.
26:44 Speaker 02 Metchnikoff was very happy that he was still interested in females.
26:49 Speaker 03 And that's just the beginning. He starts pulling out hair from an old Great Dane, from a coworker, and then from his own head to figure out why it's turning gray. And remember, he's a renowned immunologist with kind of a savior complex. So he's also spreading the gospel to everyone he knows.
27:08 Speaker 02 When he rode on public transportation, he would tell people how they should be careful about microbes. He boiled everything he ate, even strawberries and even peeled bananas. He thought that the skin probably didn't protect them well enough. And when he invited guests to restaurants, he asked to bring a burner and he sterilized the utensils.
27:34 Speaker 03 Okay, so maybe he's not like the most fun guy to have around, but this is the beginning of the science of aging, of gerontology, which, by the way, was a term that Metchnikoff coined in nineteen oh three. And science is all about making mistakes so you can find that one thing that works. And as he's conducting all these experiments, he zeroes in on this one idea, that the body was being poisoned.
28:02 Speaker 02 He thought that the root of aging, that it all started in the intestines.
28:07 Speaker 03 Specifically, the large intestine.
28:09 Speaker 04 The large intestine must be regarded as one of the organs possessed by man and yet harmful to his health and his life. The presence of large intestine in the human body is the cause of a series of misfortunes.
28:25 Speaker 03 The idea that something bad was happening in the intestines is one that dates back thousands of years, so this wasn't necessarily a new idea.
28:34 Speaker 02 But in the late 19th century, it was making a comeback because science was making new links to germs and disease.
28:41 Speaker 05 At the time, the human intestine was viewed as a cesspool of all sorts of toxins. I guess the proof that all the scientists had was, hey, just look what comes out of your rear end. Any more questions?
28:59 Speaker 02 So Metchnikoff thought that in the intestines, there are microbes that cause rotting and that the rotting is what really causes the deterioration of aging. The big question became how to fight that. Then one day, he has a breakthrough. He learned that in Bulgaria, there is this entire population of centenarians in the mountains. Remember, Metchnikoff is obsessed with centenarians. And there were newspaper articles backing up this idea that people in this region of Bulgaria were living a long time. And so he had to know, why? Yogurt. Yogurt.
29:43 Speaker 02 And I ate lots of yogurt. Metchnikoff had to tell everyone. It's 1904, Paris, a crowded lecture hall at the Society of French Agriculturalists. The famous Eli Metchnikoff is the guest speaker. The lecture was called "Old Age." And he starts by getting up there and rattling off some pretty dark ideas. He was saying how in Europe, old people are miserable.
30:12 Speaker 04 Their lives often become very difficult, unable to fulfill any useful role in the family or in the community. Old people are considered a very heavy burden.
30:24 Speaker 02 He claimed they were more likely to commit suicide or be murdered.
30:29 Speaker 04 One is shocked by the quantity of murders committed against the elderly, notably against elderly women.
30:36 Speaker 02 He also repeated, without evidence, by the way. That some cultures killed and ate their women. Because they're useless. And he said that people there say that old dogs can at least capture seals and old women can't even do that. He was painting a very gruesome picture of old age. Metchnikoff is straddling the line between serious science and being a salesman because he's still trying to sell the world on science. So he's playing to his audience, stoking the fears of aging that are growing at the time. And then saying, hey, don't worry, science has the solution.
31:14 Speaker 02 He brought an old dog and a parrot. The dog was 17 and he looked very old and undecrepative. And the parrot, who was 70, looked much younger than the dog. And then Metchnikoff lays down his science. Birds do not have such a large intestines as mammals. They don't store as many microbes. And he says, if we can find a way to prolong that decay in our intestines, then maybe we can prolong it in the rest of our bodies. And then he says, maybe there's a solution because, you know, in Bulgaria, people live that long.
31:49 Speaker 04 It is interesting to point out that this microbe is found in sour milk consumed in large quantities by Bulgarians in a region renowned for the longevity of its inhabitants.
32:01 Speaker 02 He connected all these dots together.
32:05 Speaker 02 We age because in the intestines there is rotting.
32:10 Speaker 02 And lactic acid that is produced in sour milk can stop this rotting by killing the bacteria that cause the rotting. And there you have proof.
32:23 Speaker 02 All over the world, you know, newspapers started running stories. The Chicago Daily Tribune. Sour milk is a lection, secret of long life discovered by Professor Metchnikoff. And there was no turning back. Drink sour milk and live to be 180 years old. I mean, this started a real mania, yogurt mania.
32:43 Speaker 05 The London Telegraph. The Washington Post. People who wish to live to 100, breakfast off of yogurt exclusively.
32:51 Speaker 03 Lecture, Lubas says, started a global yogurt trend that still exists today.
32:56 Speaker 02 I think it's rare to trace the beginning of an industry to a single event. But in this case, I can pretty much, I can say, you know, that the yogurt industry started with that lecture.
33:07 Speaker 03 Much later, we'd find out that yogurt was probably not the only reason people in that region of Bulgaria lived so long. But it didn't really matter. Pharmacies started stocking yogurt. Doctors recommended it to patients. People used it as a disinfectant or preparation for surgery, even to treat some diseases. This stuff was all over the place.
33:28 Speaker 02 There were ads, this café on one of the Parisian boulevards advertised Bulgarian curdled milk.
33:36 Speaker 05 The yogurt craze kind of, you know, grew and grew.
33:39 Speaker 02 I saw pictures of Danone, which I think in the States is called Danone.
33:42 Speaker 03 Yeah, Danone yogurt.
33:44 Speaker 05 I mean, I don't even know how many different brands of yogurt we have today, but Danone is still there.
33:50 Speaker 03 Even breakfast cereal pioneer John Harvey Kellogg reached out to Metchnikoff. His face was everywhere.
33:56 Speaker 02 They sold cups of yogurt and it said, recommended by Professor Metchnikoff and the medical profession.
34:11 Speaker 02 It was totally, it got out of hand completely.
34:15 Speaker 02 There was all this hype and all this hoopla about it that he had no control over.
34:22 Speaker 03 This wasn't exactly what Metchnikoff had wanted. Throughout his career, he was always arguing over how the media took his research and ran with it or twisted his words. He gave caveats to his work. He called his ideas theories.
34:37 Speaker 02 He tried sort of to present the facts and to separate it from the hype, but it was just way too late.
34:44 Speaker 02 The good thing about yogurt was that it was harmless, you know, because so many cures for aging were, you know, terrible and dangerous and lethal. And yogurt was cheap and it was safe and easily available, so it was irresistible.
35:04 Speaker 03 Metchnikoff was a scientist, but he was also a showman. Maybe yogurt wasn't a magic elixir.
35:10 Speaker 05 But science would still find the answers.
35:19 Speaker 05 Coming up, Mechnikov returns to Russia to face one of his biggest critics. He's 63 years old, and he doesn't know it yet, but he's running out of time.
35:42 Speaker 00 Hello, world. I'm Giles Smith from Zurich in Switzerland, and you are listening to Throughline from NPR. Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. This message comes from Whole Foods Market, host Thanksgiving with industry-leading quality standards from Whole Foods Market. There are no antibiotics in their meat department, ever, so carve up turkey and spiral-cut ham with peace of mind. Shop organic sides like stuffing mix and cranberry sauce from 365 Brand, and all their delectable pies are made with no high-fructose corn syrup. Gourmet Thanksgiving flavors with the quality you want, only at Whole Foods Market. This message comes from ProLon, with their five-day fasting-mimicking diet, a clinically-developed
36:25 Speaker 00 nutrition program with the goal of promoting fat loss while protecting lean body mass. Learn more at prolonlife.com/NPR.
36:35 Speaker 05 This week on the NPR Politics Podcast, a massive blue wave, a history-making realignment in American politics. What will Democrats do with their power, both in Washington and in states around the country? Listen as we unpack what a new political era could look like, this week on the NPR Politics Podcast.
37:01 Speaker 05 Part Three.
37:04 Speaker 05 Winter is coming.
37:07 Speaker 05 It was at dawn that we reached the little railway station where it carried
37:11 Speaker 02 had come to meet us. On a cloudy May morning in 1909, Eli Metchnikoff, bowtie and gray coat, and his wife Olga, white blouse, straw hat, descend from an overnight train. We were excited by the sight of the Russian country. Cool meadows, forests, fields, all such simple landscapes that we had not seen for so long. And we were also greatly moved at the idea of meeting Tolstoy. Metchnikoff has returned to Russia, where he was born, to visit the writer and philosopher Leo Tolstoy.
37:49 Speaker 02 So he was looking to sort of to solve the riddle of aging on all levels.
37:55 Speaker 02 He was looking for partners in this quest.
38:00 Speaker 04 I had long wanted to get to know Tolstoy closer, learning in person what he really thought about universal issues that had fascinated me since my youth, especially the basis of morality, the meaning of life, and the inevitability of its end.
38:18 Speaker 02 He admired so much Tolstoy's writing about the fear of death, which are really masterful.
38:24 Speaker 02 A man can be master of nothing while ever he fears death. And the man that fears not death possesses everything. Without suffering, a man would know not his limits. So he thought that Tolstoy must know some secret that I don't. This wasn't just some random meeting. Although the two had never met, their work had been in conversation for years. Tolstoy was critical of Metchnikoff's work and threw shade on science in general. Scientists can't tell useful knowledge from useless.
38:59 Speaker 04 They study such topics as the sexual organs of the amoeba only because this allows them to live like lords.
39:08 Speaker 04 And Metchnikoff had written responses about Tolstoy, warning of the dangers of discarding science and embracing just spirituality. In certain cases, his teaching had caused young researchers to drop. Burn their dissertations and join communes to start a new life.
39:30 Speaker 01 Now it's time to talk face to face. Metchnikoff had minds. Now, he needed hearts.
39:46 Speaker 01 At Tolstoy's estate, Metchnikoff notes its simplicity. The furniture functional but old. Any airs of luxury done away with. Tolstoy, eighty, with a white flowing beard and white shirt, bounces down the stairs, full of energy.
40:02 Speaker 02 The reporter called it "a meeting of two monarchs of universal literature and science."
40:08 Speaker 01 The two spend the day together, debating science versus religion. Debating as they ride in a carriage. Debating after listening to "Pianoworks" by Chopin.
40:22 Speaker 01 Debating over tea.
40:24 Speaker 07 I highly value genuine science. One that is interested in man, his fate, and happiness.
40:32 Speaker 04 Any ideal that may be capable of uniting mankind in some religion of the future must be based on scientific principles.
40:43 Speaker 01 For Metchnikoff, science and reasoning, always key. For Tolstoy, morals above all.
40:50 Speaker 07 If we are going to submit everything to reasoning, we can arrive at the most absurd nonsense. I dare say, in that case, it would be possible to justify cannibalism.
41:04 Speaker 04 Progress doesn't necessarily have to be based on people's love for one another.
41:09 Speaker 01 When it came to Metchnikoff's current work on aging...
41:11 Speaker 07 The trouble is not that our life is too short, but that we live badly, contrary to our own conscience.
41:19 Speaker 02 So the only thing on which they agreed was yogurt, because Tolstoy turned out to love yogurt. But other than that, it was pretty much a disaster, the meeting. Metchnikoff very candidly, very honestly, wrote about this himself afterwards.
41:36 Speaker 04 Tolstoy noted that at the end of the day, our worldviews coincide, but with this difference. He takes a spiritual perspective, and I take a material one.
41:48 Speaker 02 Metchnikoff was much more spiritual than Tolstoy gave him credit for. He did try, I think, to understand human psychology. And I think he thought that somehow, together with Tolstoy, he could get closer to cracking this riddle of, you know, what really happens in the human psyche, in the human mind? How, you know, we feel like that? How we feel when we age? Why, you know, this fear of death? And of course, it just, you know, totally crashed. You know, the meeting, it didn't work at all.
42:20 Speaker 03 And Tolstoy and Metchnikoff's dispute of science versus religion fit into this larger European debate at the time over how to view and improve life.
42:30 Speaker 02 At the turn of the 20th century, this was a very dominant dichotomy between pessimism and optimism.
42:39 Speaker 02 Sort of your belief, you know, about the world. You know, is the world getting better?
42:45 Speaker 03 For Tolstoy, the answer was no. So morality, love, and faith in the here and now was the most important. But Metchnikoff, an optimist, saw things differently. In headlines, The New York Times had crowned him the apostle of optimism. But of course, he continued age.
43:06 Speaker 02 In some of the Russian newspapers, he was bragging about how good he felt. He was saying that this is working. Look, you know, I'm eating yogurt three times a day. I believe, you know, it's doing me a lot of good. And look how vigorous I am.
43:25 Speaker 05 Metchnikov's outwardly positive "science will save us all" outlook was getting harder to maintain. In 1914, as his research continued, the headlines made a dark world impossible to ignore.
43:42 Speaker 03 Assassin's bullet strikes down Archduke Ferdinand of Austria. Germany declares war on Russia. England declares war on Germany. 25,000 dead and wounded. Peace refused by France. War declared, all Europe in turmoil.
43:58 Speaker 02 What really killed him was World War I. He was such a believer in rational thought, in science.
44:08 Speaker 02 He thought that there will be no more wars.
44:12 Speaker 02 That the world had learned from that. And he was devastated when war broke out and all science stopped at the Pasteur Institute.
44:20 Speaker 05 Over 100 people at the Pasteur Institute get recruited to the war effort.
44:24 Speaker 02 His wife describes it like how overnight he turned into an old man. He could not bear the idea. Now a terrible reality, that this brilliant young lives should be sacrificed.
44:37 Speaker 05 "War," she wrote, "became a dark, sinister background to his daily life." And even though he had tried to convince Tolstoy that science had the answers to everything, that now looked empty in the face of a world war. He'd always thought his purpose in life was to help people reach their death instinct, right? To live longer and live healthier until they felt ready to go. The idea that humans would willfully create so much death crushed him.
45:07 Speaker 01 The contrast between his aspiration and the cruel reality had been to him a blow
45:12 Speaker 02 which his sensitive and suffering heart was not fit to bear.
45:18 Speaker 02 In 1916, so this is already what, like more than a year after the war started, his health began to deteriorate and he developed heart disease, heart failure. In terms of the fear of death, he kept coming back to this. And he kept saying that, "I have conquered my fear of death, I have conquered it." And the truth is that you end up feeling the exact opposite. Because had it been true, I don't think he would have had the need to repeat it so many times. So it was obviously something that he was still struggling with, I think, till the end of his life.
45:57 Speaker 04 Let all those who expected me to live 100 years or longer forgive me my premature death.
46:13 Speaker 05 So he died from a heart attack.
46:18 Speaker 05 And the moments before he died, he asked his assistant
46:25 Speaker 05 to carefully look into his intestines and see what's there once he was gone.
46:36 Speaker 02 He died in 1916 at 71, not even halfway to the 150 that he thought, you know, people should live.
46:47 Speaker 02 Many people were all over the world were disappointed. There were headlines saying, you know, what have you done? You know, we believed. You know, because even despite all the skepticism, I think people wanted to believe that maybe it's true. Maybe he has found a recipe, a cure.
47:28 Speaker 02 What's the secret to a good life? I don't know what I want to do. I don't know what I want to do.
47:38 Speaker 02 I will never be.
47:44 Speaker 02 Aging is not inevitable anymore. Companies are betting big money on it. If we can slow aging enough, then we will be happy. If you're concerned about preventing or minimizing the signs of aging, then this video is for you. These are the nine anti-aging foods.
48:00 Speaker 03 Drugs that can slow down the aging process.
48:15 Speaker 07 You know, we should all be so lucky to age and grow old and get to experience this part of life. When you try and imagine it when you're younger, you think you may not want to be there because you get these images in your head of being bent over, you know, using these walkers and you don't want that to happen to you. But once you get out here, you know, you look around and you go, hey, nothing's different. I'm just older. This is Jay Oshansky, professor of public health at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He's one of the people today following in Eli Metchnikoff's footsteps. Been working in the field of aging for almost 40 years. Trying to figure out why people live as long as we do and how to make that last even longer.
48:59 Speaker 07 In the year 2000, a few years after Eli Metchnikoff would have turned 150, Jay made a bet. Basically, the bet was all about whether or not anyone alive in the year 2000 would be alive in the year 2150. Could science keep someone alive until they're 150 years old? My good friend thought that it was possible and I said, no, it's not possible. The process of living itself leads to the degradation, the continuous degradation that ultimately leads to the demise of mind or body. And we have components of the body that don't replicate.
49:39 Speaker 07 Muscle fibers, brain neurons, parts of our bodies that power on life and degrade as you age. Those are our Achilles' heels. So we can't get these bodies to last that long unless we turn the engine of life off. And when you turn the engine of life off, you're dead. But Jay believes in the promise of science. It's taken us so far already. People live much longer than they Did in Metchnikoff's day. Jay thinks science will take us even farther, so that we can live healthier, longer. Do I know which one of these interventions is going to succeed? No, I don't know. All we need is one that does.
50:25 Speaker 07 The human desire to beat aging began way before Metchnikoff and will likely last way after Jay.
50:33 Speaker 05 Nobody likes to die. So we want to extend the lifespan as much as possible and health span as much as possible, kind of just how Metchnikoff envisioned. And with that goal, we keep searching.
50:53 Speaker 07 Winter will come for me. It will come for all of us. The question is, when? And what can we do to do what's the most important thing, in my view, which is to enjoy life while we're here? We only get to go through this journey once. And, you know, for humans, it's about 29,000 to 30,000 days. That's all we get. It, you know, varies, but that's it. 29,000 to 30,000 days. That's it.
51:25 Speaker 07 Though, in some ways, some of us get more than that. Eli Metchnikoff wasn't able to beat aging, but he's still with us in fridges and on breakfast tables everywhere.
51:47 Speaker 02 That's it for this week's show. I'm Randa Abdel Fattah.
51:50 Speaker 01 I'm Ramtin Arablouei, and you've been listening to Throughline from NPR.
51:55 Speaker 02 Next week in our series, The History of the Self, we explore what's hiding in our dreams.
52:02 Speaker 03 Dreams are a process of adaptation. Dreams have to do with preparing the dreamer for the next day.
52:09 Speaker 01 They are not random at all.
52:12 Speaker 00 This episode was produced by me.
52:14 Speaker 01 And me, and.
52:15 Speaker 03 Lawrence Wu.
52:16 Speaker 01 Julie Kane.
52:18 Speaker 00 Anya Steinberg.
52:19 Speaker 05 Casey Minor. Christina Kim.
52:21 Speaker 03 Devon Katayama. Peter Balanon Rosen. Thomas Lu.
52:26 Speaker 01 Irene Noguchi. Thanks to Leslie Kosoff, Susan Evans, Sam Evans, Carol Hacker, Stefan Hubenoff, and Anandita Palero. Also, thanks to Sasha Solieva, Zohar Kinzierski, Artem Kuznisov, Peter Balanon Rosen, Anya Steinberg, Thomas Lu, and Laurent LaSablier for their voiceover work.
52:51 Speaker 00 Fact checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vogel.
52:54 Speaker 01 This episode was mixed by Maggie Luthar. Thanks to Johannes Derghi, Ed Chapin, Colin Campbell, and Anya Grunman.
53:03 Speaker 00 Music was composed by Ramtin and his band Drop Electric, which includes. Anya Mizani.
53:09 Speaker 03 Navid. Marvi. Sho Fujiwara.
53:12 Speaker 01 And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, please write us at [email protected] .
53:19 Speaker 00 Thanks for listening.
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Previous History of the Self: Love Next History of the Self: Dreams Page updated November 5, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated