Élie Metchnikoff

Élie Metchnikoff (1845-1916), Russian biologist and Nobel laureate, a founder of the science of immunity. His name in Russian is Ilya Ilich Mechnikov.

Metchnikoff was born near Kharkiv on May 15, 1845, and educated at the University of Kharkiv and, in Germany, at the Universities of Giessen, Göttingen, and Munich. He lectured in zoology and comparative anatomy at the University of Odesa from 1870 to 1882. In 1904 he became a subdirector of the Pasteur Institute in Paris. His early studies were devoted to the process of intracellular digestion in invertebrates. He later established the destructive effect of certain white blood cells, which he called phagocytes, on harmful materials in the bloodstream, and in 1884 he announced his theory of phagocytosis, which formed a basis for the theory of immunity. Metchnikoff also advocated consumption of lactic acid bacteria for the prevention and remedy of intestinal putrefaction. For his research on immunity he shared the 1908 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with the German bacteriologist Paul Ehrlich.