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
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.
Metchnikoff was a scientist, but he was also a showman. Maybe yogurt wasn't a magic elixir, but science would still find the answers. Coming up, Metchnikov 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.
On a cloudy May morning in 1909, Eli Mechnikov, bowtie and gray coat, and his wife Olga, white blouse, straw hat, descend from an overnight train.
Metchnikov has returned to Russia, where he was born, to visit the writer and philosopher Leo Tolstoy.
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.
And Metchnikov had written responses about Tolstoy, warning of the dangers of discarding science and embracing just spirituality.
Now it's time to talk face to face. Metchnikov had minds. Now he needed hearts. At Tolstoy's estate, Metchnikoff notes its simplicity. The furniture functional but old, any airs of luxury done away with. Tolstoy, 80, with a white flowing beard and white shirt, bounces down the stairs full of energy.
The two spend the day together, debating science versus religion, debating as they ride in a carriage, debating after listening to Piano Works by Chopin, debating over tea,
For Metchnikov, science and reasoning always key. For Tolstoy, morals above all.
Tolstoy and Menshnikov's dispute of science versus religion fit into this larger European debate at the time over how to view and improve life.
For Tolstoy, the answer was no. So morality, love, and faith in the here and now was the most important. But Metchnikov, an optimist, saw things differently. In headlines, the New York Times had crowned him the apostle of optimism. But of course, he continued to age.
Metchnikoff'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.
Over 100 people at the Pasteur Institute get recruited to the war effort.
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, to live longer and live healthier until they felt ready to go.
The idea that humans would willfully create so much death crushed him.
It's a secret to a good life.
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.
Trying to figure out why people live as long as we do and how to make that last even longer. In the year 2000, a few years after Eli Metchnikoff would have turned 150, Jay made a bet.
Could science keep someone alive until they're 150 years old?
Muscle fibers, brain neurons, parts of our bodies that power on life and degrade as you age.
Showing 61–80 of 83 · page 4 of 5
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