Devin Katayama
speaker
83 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Devin Katayama’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
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.
Around the turn of the century, while Metchnikoff was consumed by his work on immunity, another question started to nag at him.
The Pasteur Institute was home to the miracle makers of the day, scientists who were researching vaccination or figuring out what caused plague.
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.
And Metchnikoff comes up with this theory, an idea that would stay with him throughout his entire life.
The death instinct.
He became so obsessed with figuring out how older people felt as they approached death that he would literally chase the elderly down.
This is Carol Haber. She's a professor and Dean Emerita of Tulane University in the School of Liberal Arts.
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.
At that time, the Industrial Revolution was changing how families lived and worked. And in this work revolution, the elderly were getting left behind.
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.
La Sapetrière was an infamous hospital in Paris. It had long doubled as a psychiatric ward and a home for the elderly.
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.
But it was the perfect laboratory for Medzhnikov.
Even in a miserable place like Salpêtrière, people wanted to live longer.
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.
Coming up, Metchnikoff heads back to the lab with a new mission, to extend human life to 150 years.
In his 20s, Eli Metchnikoff had been visited by death.
This sent Metchnikoff into a deep depression. And then a decade later, he went through it again.
And this changed everything for Metchnikov.
Showing 21–40 of 83 · page 2 of 5
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