Luba Vukonsky
speaker
63 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Luba Vukonsky’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
The French morning newspaper Le Matin carried a huge headline article in large block letters all across the front page. And it said, vive la vie, long live life.
He was very famous. He was one of the most famous scientists in the world.
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.
He thought that a solution to everything was science. So, of course, science was going to solve aging as well.
This became for him like a new mission.
Free the world from this terrible affliction.
Entire sacks of letters that piled up in the mailroom was stuffed with letters from people who didn't want to die.
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.
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.
And I've written a book called Immunity, How Ilya Mechnikov Changed the Course of Modern Medicine.
And in the larvae, he saw mobile cells.
He came up with the idea that maybe this is a defensive force of the organism.
He performed an experiment. It's a very famous experiment in immunology where he inserted thorns into these larvae.
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 larva.
In fact, this was the first material evidence of inner healing forces in science.
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.
He was living in Paris and working at the Pasteur Institute.
He was in his mid-50s. He started having kidney trouble. And he began to worry about his own aging. And he also began to fear death.
And he was appalled to discover how little was known about aging and that there was no systematic study of aging. They were textbooks about diseases of old age, but not about old age itself.
His hope was that if people live long enough, they will develop this death instinct.
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