METCHNIKOFF
THE NICE PHAGOCYTES
I
Microbe hunting has always been a queer humpty-dumpty business.
A janitor with no proper education was the first man to see microbes;
a chemist put them on the map and made people properly afraid of
them; a country doctor turned the hunting of them into something that
came near to being a science; to save the lives of babies from the
poison of one of the deadliest of them, a Frenchman and a German had
to pile up mountains of butchered guinea-pigs and rabbits. Microbe
hunting is a story of amazing stupidities, fine intuitions, insane
paradoxes. If that is the history of the hunting of microbes, it is
the same with the story of the science, still in its babyhood, of
why we are immune to microbes. For Metchnikoff, the always excited
searcher who in a manner of speaking founded that science--this
Metchnikoff was not a sober scientific investigator; he was more like
some hysterical character out of one of Dostoevski’s novels.
Élie Metchnikoff was a Jew, and was born in southern Russia in
1845, and before he was twenty years old, he said: “I have zeal
and ability, I am naturally talented--I am ambitious to become a
distinguished investigator!”
He went to the University of Kharkoff, borrowed the then rare
microscope from one of his professors, and after peering (more or
less dimly) through it, this ambitious young man sat himself down
and wrote long scientific papers before he had any idea at all
of what science was. He bolted his classes for months on end, not
to play, but to read; not to read novels mind you but to wallow
through learned works on the “Crystals of Proteic Substances” and to
become passionate about inflammatory pamphlets whose discovery by
the police would have sent him to the mines in Siberia. He sat up
nights, drinking gallons of tea and haranguing his young colleagues
(all of them forefathers of the present Bolsheviki) on atheism until
they nicknamed him “God-Is-Not.” Then, a few days before the end of
the term, he crammed up the neglected lessons of months; and his
prodigious memory, which was more like some weird phonograph record
than any human brain, made it possible for him to write home to his
folks that he had passed first and got a gold medal.
Metchnikoff was always trying to get ahead of himself. He sent
papers to scientific journals while he was still in his teens; he
wrote these papers frantically a few hours after he had trained his
microscope on some bug or beetle; the next day he would look at
them again, and find that what he had been so certain of, was not
quite the same now. Hastily he wrote to the editor of the scientific
journal: “Please do not publish the manuscript I sent you yesterday.
I find I have made a mistake.” At other times he was furious because
his enthusiastic discoveries were turned down by the editors. “The
world does not appreciate me!” he cried, and he went to his room,
ready to die, dolefully whistling: “Were I small as a snail, I would
hide myself in my shell.”
But if Metchnikoff sobbed because his vivid talents were
underestimated by his professors, he was also irrepressible. He
forgot his contemplated suicides and his violent headaches in his
incessant interest in all living things, but he was constantly
spoiling his chances to do a good steady piece of scientific work by
getting into quarrels with his teachers. Finally he told his mother
(who had always spoiled him and believed in him): “I am especially
interested in the study of protoplasm ... but there is no science in
Russia,” so he rushed off to the University of Würzburg in Germany,
only to find that he had arrived there six weeks ahead of the opening
of school. He sought out some Russian students there, but they gave
him the cold shoulder--he was a Jew--then, tired of life, he started
back home, thinking of killing himself but with a few books in his
satchel--and one of these was the just-published “Origin of Species”
of Darwin. He read it, he swallowed the Theory of Organic Evolution
with one great mental gulp, he became a bigoted supporter of it--from
then on evolution was his religion until he began founding new
scientific religions of his own.
He forgot his plans for suicide; he planned strange evolutionary
researches; he lay awake nights, seeing visions--huge panoramas they
were, of all beasts from cockroaches to elephants, as the children of
some one remote and infinitely tiny ancestor....
That conversion was Metchnikoff’s real start in life, for now he set
out (and kept at it for ten years), quarreling and expostulating his
way from one laboratory to another, from Russia through Germany to
Italy, and from Italy to the island of Heligoland. He worked at the
evolution of worms. He accused the distinguished German zoölogist
Leuckart of stealing his stuff; incurably clumsy with his fingers, he
clawed desperately into a lizard to find the story of evolution its
insides might tell him--and when he could not find what he wanted, he
threw what was left of the reptile across the laboratory. Unlike Koch
or Leeuwenhoek, who were great because they knew how to ask questions
of nature, Metchnikoff read books on Evolution, was inspired, shouted
“Yes!” and then by vast sloppy experiments proceeded to try to force
his beliefs down nature’s throat. Strange to say, sometimes he was
right, importantly right as you will see. Up till now (it was in the
late eighteen seventies) he knew nothing about microbes, but all the
time his mania to prove the survival of the fittest was driving him
toward his fantastic theory--partly true--of how mankind resists the
assaults of germs.
Metchnikoff’s first thirty-five years were a hubbub and a
perilously near disastrous groping toward this event--toward that
great notoriety that waited for him on the Island of Sicily in
the Mediterranean Sea. At twenty-three he had married Ludmilla
Feodorovitch, who was a consumptive and had to be carried to the
wedding in an invalid’s chair. Then followed a pitiful four years
for them. They dragged about Europe, looking for a cure; Metchnikoff
trying in odd moments snatched from an irritatedly tender nursing
of his wife, to do experiments on the development of green flies
and sponges and worms and scorpions--trying above all to make some
sensational discovery which might land him a well-paid professorship.
“The survivors are not the best but the most cunning,” he whispered,
as he published his scientific papers and pulled his wires....
Finally Ludmilla died; she had spent her last days solaced by
morphine, and now Metchnikoff, who had caught the habit from her,
wandered from her grave through Spain to Geneva, taking larger and
larger doses of the drug--meanwhile, his eyes hurt him terribly, and
what is a naturalist, a searcher, without eyes?
“Why live?” he cried, and took a dose of morphine that he knew must
kill him, but the dose was too large, he became nauseated and threw
it up. “Why live?” he cried again and took a hot bath and rushed
out in the open air right afterwards to try to catch his death
of pneumonia. But it seems that the wise witty gods who fashion
searchers had other purposes for him. That very night he stopped,
agape at the spectacle of a cloud of insects swirling round the
flame of a lantern. “These insects live only a few hours!” he cried
to himself. “How can the theory of the survival of the fittest be
applied to them?” So he plunged back into his experiments.
Metchnikoff’s grief was terrific but it did not last long. He was
appointed Professor at the University of Odessa, and there he taught
the Survival of the Fittest and became respected for his learning,
and grew in dignity, and in less than two years after the death of
Ludmilla, he had met Olga, a bright girl of fifteen, the daughter
of a man of property. “His appearance is not unlike that of the
Christ--he is so pale and seems so sad,” whispered Olga. Soon after
they were married.
From then on Metchnikoff’s life was much less disastrous; he tried
far less often to commit suicide; his hands began to catch up with
his precocious brain--he was learning to do experiments. Never was
there a man who tried more sincerely to apply his religion (which was
science) to every part of his life. He took Olga in hand and taught
her science and art, and even the art and science of marriage! She
worshiped the profound certainties that science gave him, but said,
long afterwards: “The scientific methods which Metchnikoff applied
to everything might have been a grave mistake at this delicate
psychological moment....”
II
It was in 1883, when the discoveries of Pasteur and Koch had made
everybody mad about microbes, that Metchnikoff turned suddenly
from a naturalist into a microbe hunter. He had wrangled with the
authorities of the University of Odessa, and departed for the Island
of Sicily with Olga and her crowd of little brothers and sisters,
and here he set up his amateur laboratory in the parlor of their
cottage looking across the magic water to the blue Calabrian shore.
His intuition told him that microbes were now the thing in science
and he dreamed about making great discoveries of new microbes--he was
sincerely interested in them as well, but he knew nothing about the
subtle ways of hunting them, indeed he had hardly seen a germ. He
stamped about his parlor-laboratory, expounding biological theories
to Olga, studying starfish and sponges, telling the children fairy
stories, doing everything in short that was as far as possible
removed from those thrilling researches of Koch and Pasteur....
Then, one day, he began to study the way sponges and starfishes
digest their food. Long before he had spied out strange cells inside
these beasts, cells that were a part of their bodies, but cells that
were free-lances, as it were, moving from place to place through
the carcasses of which they formed a part, sticking out one part
of themselves and dragging the rest of themselves after the part
they had stuck out. Such were the _wandering cells_, which moved by
flowing, exactly like that small animal, the ameba.
Metchnikoff sat down before his parlor table, and with that impatient
clumsiness of a man whose hands seem unable to obey his brain, he
got some little particles of carmine into the insides of the larva
of a starfish. This was an ingenious and very original trick of
Metchnikoff’s, because these larvæ are as transparent as a good
glass window; so he could see, through his lens, what went on
inside the beast; and with excited delight he watched the crawling,
flowing free-lance cells in this starfish ooze toward his carmine
particles--and eat them up! Metchnikoff still imagined he was
studying the digestion of his starfish, but strange thoughts--that
had nothing to do with such a commonplace thing as digestion--little
fog-wraiths of new ideas began to flutter through his head....
The next day Olga took the children to the circus to see some
extraordinary performing monkeys. Metchnikoff sat alone in his
parlor, tugging at his biblical beard, gazing without seeing them at
his bowls of starfish. Then--it was like that blinding light that
bowled Paul over on his way to Damascus--in one moment, in the most
fantastical, you would say impossible flash of a second, Metchnikoff
changed his whole career.
“These wandering cells in the body of the larva of a starfish, these
cells eat food, they gobble up carmine granules--but they must eat
up microbes too! Of course--the wandering cells are what protect the
starfish from microbes! _Our_ wandering cells, the white cells of our
blood--they must be what protects us from invading germs ... they are
the cause of immunity to diseases ... they are what keep the human
race from being killed off by malignant bacilli!”
Without one single bit of evidence, without any research at all,
Metchnikoff jumped from the digestions of starfish to the ills of
men....
“I suddenly became a pathologist,” he wrote in his diary (and this
was not much more strange than if a cornet player should suddenly
announce himself an astrophysicist!) “... Feeling that there was in
this idea something of surpassing interest, I became so excited that
I began striding up and down the room, and even went to the seashore
to collect my thoughts.”
Now Koch, precise microbe hunter that he was, would hardly have
trusted Metchnikoff with the wiping of his microscope, but his
ignorance of germs was nothing to this wild Russian.
“I said to myself that, if my theory was true, a sliver put into
the body of a starfish larva ... should soon be surrounded by
wandering cells....” And he remembered that when men run splinters
into their fingers, and neglect to pull them out, those splinters
are soon surrounded by pus--which consists largely of the wandering
white cells of the blood. He rushed out into the garden back of the
cottage, pulled some rose thorns off a little shrub which he had
decorated as a Christmas tree for Olga’s brother and sisters; he
dashed back into his absurd laboratory and stuck these thorns into
the body of one of his water-clear young starfish....
Up he got, at dawn the next morning, full of wild hopes,--and he
found his guess had come true. Around the rose-slivers in the
starfish were sluggish crawling masses of its wandering cells!
Nothing more was necessary (such a jumper at conclusions was he) to
stamp into his brain the fixed idea that he now had the explanation
of all immunity to diseases; he rushed out that morning to tell
famous European professors, who happened then to be in Messina, all
about his great idea. “Here is why animals can withstand the attacks
of microbes,” he said, and he talked with such enthusiastic eloquence
about how the wandering cells of the starfish tried to eat the rose
thorns (and he could show it so prettily too) that even the most
eminent and pope-like Professor Doctor Virchow (who had sniffed at
Koch) believed him!
Metchnikoff was now a microbe hunter....
III
With Olga and the children flapping along and keeping up as best they
could, Metchnikoff hurried to Vienna to proclaim his theory that
we are immune to germs because our bodies have wandering cells to
gobble germs up; he made a bee-line for the laboratory of his friend,
Professor Claus--who was a zoölogist, and knew nothing about microbes
either, and so was properly amazed:
“I would be greatly honored to have you publish your theory in my
Journal,” said Claus.
“But I must have a scientific name for these cells that devour
microbes--a Greek name--what would be a Greek name for such cells?”
cried Metchnikoff.
Claus and his learned colleagues scratched their heads and peered
into their dictionaries and at last they told him: “Phagocytes!
Phagocyte is Greek for devouring cell--phagocytes is what you must
call them!”
Metchnikoff thanked them, tacked the word “phagocyte” to the head
of his mast, and set sail on the seas of his exciting career as
a microbe hunter with that word as a religion, an explanation of
everything, a slogan, a means of gaining a living--and, though you
may not believe it, that word did result in something of a start
at finding out how it is we are immune! From then on he preached
phagocytes, he defended their reputations, he did some real research
on them, he made enemies about them, he doubtless helped to start the
war of 1914 with them, by the bad feeling they caused between France
and Germany.
He went from Vienna to Odessa, and there he gave a great scientific
speech on “The Curative Forces of the Organism” to the astonished
doctors of the town. His delivery was superb; his sincerity was
undoubted--but there is no record of whether or not he told the
amazed doctors that he had not, up till then, so much as seen one
phagocyte gobble up a single malignant microbe. Everybody--and this
includes learned doctors--will stop to watch a dog fight; so this
idea of Metchnikoff’s, this story of our little white blood cells
rushing to an endless series of Thermopylæs to man the pass against
murderous germs--this yarn excited them, convinced them....
But Metchnikoff knew he would have to have real evidence, and
presently he found it, beautifully clear, in water fleas. For a time
he forgot speeches and began fishing water fleas out of ponds and
aquariums; here he was deucedly ingenious again, for these small
animals, like starfish larvæ, were transparent so that he could see
through his lens what went on inside them. For once he grew patient,
and searched, like the real searcher that he so rarely was, for
some disease that a water flea perchance might have. This history
has already made it clear that microbe hunters usually find other
things than they set out to look for--but Metchnikoff just now had
different luck; he watched his water fleas in their aimless daily
life, and suddenly, through his lens he saw one of these beasts
swallow the sharp, needle-like spores of a dangerous yeast. Down
into the wee gullet went these needles, through the walls of the
flea’s stomach they poked their sharp points, and into the tiny
beast’s body they glided. Then--how could the gods favor such a wild
man so!--Metchnikoff saw the wandering cells of the water flea, the
_phagocytes_ of this creature, flow towards those perilous needles,
surround them, eat them, melt them up, digest them....
When--and this happened often too and so made his theory perfect--the
phagocytes failed to go out to battle against the deadly yeast
needles, these invaders budded rapidly into swarming yeasts, which in
their turn ate the water flea, poisoned him--and that meant good-by
to him!
Here Metchnikoff had peeped prettily into a thrilling, deadly
struggle on a tiny scale, he had spied upon the up till now
completely mysterious way in which _certain_ living creatures defend
themselves against their would-be assassins. His observations were
true as steel, and you will have to grant they were devilishly
ingenious, for who would have thought to look for the why of immunity
in such an absurd beast as the water flea? Now Metchnikoff needed
nothing more to convince him of the absolute and final rightness of
his theory, he probed no deeper into this struggle (which Koch would
have spent years over) but wrote a learned paper:
“The immunity of the water flea, due to the help of its phagocytes,
is an example of natural immunity ... for, once the wandering cells
have not swallowed the yeast spore at the moment of its penetration
into the body, the yeast germinates ... secretes a poison which
drives the phagocytes back not only, but kills them by dissolving
them completely.”
IV
Then Metchnikoff went to see if this same battle took place in
frogs and rabbits, and suddenly, in 1886, the Russian people were
thrilled by Pasteur’s saving of sixteen of their folk from the bite
of the mad wolf. The good people of Odessa and the farmers of the
Zemstvo round about gave thanks to God, hurrahs for Pasteur, and a
mighty purse of roubles for a laboratory to be started at once in
Odessa. And Metchnikoff was appointed Scientific Director of the
new Institute--for had not this man (they forgot for a moment he
was Jewish) studied in all the Universities of Europe, and had he
not lectured learnedly to the doctors of Odessa, telling about the
phagocytes of the blood, which gobble microbes?
“Who knows?” you can hear the people saying. “Maybe in our new
Institute, Professor Metchnikoff can train these little phagocytes to
gobble up all microbes?”
Metchnikoff accepted the position, but told the authorities,
shrewdly: “I am only a theoretician; I am overwhelmed with
researches--some one else will have to be trained to make vaccines,
to do the practical work.”
Nobody in Odessa knew anything about microbe hunting then, so
Metchnikoff’s friend, Doctor Gamaléia, was sent to the Pasteur
Institute in Paris posthaste. The citizens were anxious to begin
to be prevented from having diseases; they bawled for vaccines.
So Gamaléia, after a little while in Paris, where he watched Roux
and Pasteur and learned a great deal from them, but not quite
enough--this Gamaléia came back and started to make anthrax vaccines
for the sheep of the Zemstvo, and rabies vaccines for the people
of the town. “All should now go very well!” cried Metchnikoff (he
knew nothing of the nasty tricks virulent microbes can play) and
he retired to his theoretical fastnesses to grapple with rabbits
and dogs and monkeys, to see if their phagocytes would swallow
the microbes of consumption and relapsing fever and erysipelas.
Scientific papers vomited from his laboratory, and the searchers
of Europe began to be excited by the discoveries of this strange
genius in the south of Russia. But he began to have troubles with his
theory, for dogs and rabbits and monkeys--alas--are not transparent,
like water fleas....
Then the shambles began. Gamaléia and the other members of
Metchnikoff’s practical staff began to fight among themselves and
mix up vaccines; microbes spilled out of tubes; the doctors of the
town--naturally a little jealous of this new form of healing--started
to snoop into the laboratory, to ask embarrassing questions, to
start whispers going through the town: “Who is this Professor
Metchnikoff--he hasn’t even a doctor’s certificate. He is only
a naturalist, a mere bug-hunter--how can he know anything about
preventing diseases?”
“Where are those cures?” demanded the people. “Give us our
preventions!” shouted the farmers--who had gone down into their socks
for good roubles. Metchnikoff came out of the fog of his theory of
phagocytes for a moment, and tried to satisfy them by sowing chicken
cholera bacilli among the meadow mice which were eating up the
crops. But, alas, a lying, inflammatory report appeared in the daily
paper, screaming that this Metchnikoff was sowing death--that chicken
cholera could change into human cholera....
“I am overwhelmed with my researches,” muttered Metchnikoff. “I am
a theoretician--my researches need a peaceful shelter in which to
be developed....” So he asked for a vacation, got it, packed his
bag, and went to the Congress of Vienna to tell everybody about
phagocytes, and to look for a quiet place in which to work. He _must_
get away from that dreadful need to prove that his theories were
true by dishing out cures to impatient authorities and peasants who
insisted on getting their money’s worth out of research. From Vienna
he went to Paris to the Pasteur Institute, and there a great triumph
and surprise waited for him. He was introduced to Pasteur, and at
once Metchnikoff exploded into tremendous explanations of his theory
of phagocytes. He made a veritable movie of the battle between the
wandering cells and microbes....
The old captain of the microbe hunters looked at Metchnikoff out
of tired gray eyes that now and then sparkled a little: “I at
once placed myself on your side, Professor Metchnikoff,” said
Pasteur, “for I have been struck by the struggle between the divers
microörganisms which I have had occasion to observe. I believe you
are on the right road.”
Although the struggles Pasteur mentioned had nothing to do with
phagocytes gobbling up microbes, Metchnikoff--and this is not
unnatural--was filled with a proud joy. The greatest of all microbe
hunters really understood him, believed in him.... Olga’s father
had died, leaving them a modest income, here in Paris his theory of
phagocytes would have the prestige of a great Institute back of it.
“Is there a place for me here?” he asked. “I wish only to work in one
of your laboratories in an honorary capacity,” begged Metchnikoff.
Pasteur knew how important it was to keep the plain people thrilled
about microbe hunting--it is the _drama_ of science that they can
understand--so Pasteur said: “You may not only come to work in our
laboratory, but you shall have an entire laboratory to yourself!”
Metchnikoff went back to Odessa, getting a dreadful snubbing from
Koch on the way, and wondered whether it would not be best to give
up his tidy salary at the Russian Institute, to get away from these
people yelling for results.... But he began to take up his work
again, when suddenly something happened that left no doubt in his
mind as to what he had better do.
In response to the farmer’s complaints of “Where are your vaccines,
our flocks are perishing from anthrax!” Metchnikoff had told Dr.
Gamaléia to start giving sheep the anthrax vaccine on a large scale.
Then, one bright morning, while the Director was with Olga in their
summer home, in the country, a fearful telegram came to him from
Gamaléia:
“MANY THOUSANDS OF SHEEP KILLED BY THE ANTHRAX VACCINE.”
A few months later they were safely installed in the new Pasteur
Institute in Paris, and Olga (who enjoyed painting and sculpture
much better--but who would do anything for her husband because he
was a genius, and always kind to her) this good wife, Olga, held his
animals and washed his bottles for Metchnikoff. From then on they
marched, hand in hand, over a road strewn with their picturesque
mistakes, from one triumph to always greater victories and
notorieties.
V
Metchnikoff bounced into the austere Pasteur Institute and started a
circus there which lasted for twenty years; it was as if a skilled
proprietor of a medicine show had become pastor of a congregation of
sober Quakers. He came to Paris and found himself already notorious.
His theory of immunity--it would be better to call it an exciting
romance, rather than a theory--this story that we are immune because
of a kind of battle royal between our phagocytes and marauding
microbes, this yarn had thrown the searchers of Europe into an
uproar. The microbe hunters of Germany and Austria for the most part
did not believe it--on the contrary, tempted to believe it by its
simplicity and prettiness, they denied it with a peculiar violence.
They denounced Metchnikoff in congresses and by experiments. One
old German, Baumgarten, wrote a general denunciation of phagocytes,
on principle, once a year, in an important scientific journal. For
a little while Metchnikoff wavered; he nearly swooned, he couldn’t
sleep nights, he thought of going back to his soothing morphine; he
even contemplated suicide once more--oh! why could not those nasty
Germans see that he was right about phagocytes? Then he recovered.
Something seemed to snap in his brain, he became courageous as a
lion, he started a battle for his theory--it was a grotesque, partly
scientific wrangle--but, in spite of all its silliness, it was an
argument that laid the foundations of the little that is known to-day
about why we are immune to microbes.
“I have demonstrated that the serum of rats kills anthrax germs--it
is the _blood_ of animals not their phagocytes, that makes them
immune to microbes,” shouted Emil Behring, and all the bitter
enemies of Metchnikoff sang Aye in the chorus. The scientific papers
published to show that blood is the one important thing would fill
three university libraries.
“It is the phagocytes that eat up germs and so defend us,” roared
Metchnikoff in reply. And he published ingenious experiments which
proved anthrax bacilli grow exuberantly in the blood of sheep which
have been made immune by Pasteur’s vaccine.
Neither side would budge from this extreme, prejudiced position. For
twenty years both sides were so enraged they could not stop to think
that perhaps both our blood _and_ our phagocytes might work together
to guard us from germs. That fight was a kind of magnificent but
undignified shouting of “You’re a liar--On the contrary, it’s you
that’s the liar!” which blinded Metchnikoff and his opponents to the
idea that it might be neither the blood nor the phagocytes which are
at the bottom of our resistance to some diseases. If they had only
stopped for a moment, wiped their brows and cleaned the blood from
their mental noses, to remember how little they knew, how slowly they
should go--considering what subtle complicated stuff this blood and
those phagocytes are--if they had only remembered how foolish, in the
darkness of their ignorance, it was to cook up any explanation at
all of why we are immune! If Metchnikoff had only kept on, obscure
in Odessa, with his beautiful researches on the why of the wandering
cells of the water fleas eating up those terrible little yeasts....
If he had only been patient and tried to get to the bottom of that!
But the stumbling strides of microbe hunters are not made by any
perfect logic, and that is the reason I may write a grotesque, but
not perfect story of their deeds.
In the grand days of Pasteur’s fight with anthrax and his victory
against rabies, he had worked like some subterranean distiller of
secret poisons, with only Roux and Chamberland and one or two others
to help him. In that dingy laboratory in the Rue d’Ulm he had been
very impolite, even nasty, to all curious intruders and ambitious
persons. He even chased adoring pretty ladies away. But Metchnikoff!
Here was an entirely different sort of searcher. Metchnikoff had
an immensely impressive beard and a broad forehead that crowned
eyes which squinted vividly--and intelligently--from behind his
spectacles. His hair grew down over the back of his neck in a way
that showed you he was too deep in thoughts to think of having it
cut. He knew everything! He could tell--and it was authentic--of
countless biological mysteries; he had seen the wandering cells of
a tadpole turn it into a frog by eating the tadpole’s tail, and
he had built circles of fire around scorpions to show that these
unhappy creatures, failing to find a way out, do not commit suicide
by stinging themselves to death. He told these horrors in a way
to make you feel the remorseless flowing and swallowing of the
wandering cells--you could hear the hissing of the doomed and baffled
scorpion....
He had brilliant ideas for experiments and was always trying to carry
out these ideas--intensely--but at any moment he was ready to drop
his science to praise the operas of Mozart or whistle the symphonies
of Beethoven, and sometimes he seemed to be more learned about the
dramas and the loves of Goethe than about those phagocytes upon which
his whole fame rested. He refused to wear a high hat toward lesser
men; he would see any one and was ready to believe anything--he even
tried the remedies of patent medicine quacks on dying guinea-pigs.
And he was a kind man. When his friends were sick he overwhelmed
them with delicacies and advice and shed sincere tears on their
pillows--so that finally they nicknamed him “Mamma Metchnikoff.”
His views on the intimate instincts and necessities of life were
astoundingly unlike those of any searcher I have ever heard of.
“The truth is that artistic genius and perhaps all kinds of genius
are closely associated with sexual activity ... so, for example,
an orator speaks better in the presence of a woman to whom he is
devoted.”
He insisted that he could experiment best when pretty girls were
close by!
Metchnikoff’s workshop in the Pasteur Institute was more than a mere
laboratory; it was a studio, it had the variegated attractions of
a country fair; it radiated the verve and gusto of a three-ringed
circus. Is it any wonder, then, that young doctors, eager to learn
to hunt microbes, flocked to him from all over Europe? Their brains
responded to this great searcher who was also a hypnotist, and their
fingers flew to perform the ten thousand experiments, ideas for which
belched out of the mind of Metchnikoff like an incessant eruption of
fireworks.
“Mr. Saltykoff!” he would cry. “This student of Professor Pfeiffer
in Germany claims that the serum of a guinea-pig will keep other
guinea-pigs from dying of hog-cholera. Will you be so good as to
perform an experiment to see if that is so?” And the worshiping
Saltykoff rushed off--knowing what the master wanted to prove--to
show that the German claims were nonsense. For a hundred other
intricate tests, for which his own fingers were too impatient,
Metchnikoff called upon Blagovestchensky, or Hugenschmidt, or Wagner,
or Gheorgiewski, or the now almost forgotten Sawtchenko. Or when
these were all busy, then there was Olga to be lured away from her
paints and clay models--Olga could be depended upon to prove the
most delicate points. In that laboratory there were a hundred hearts
that beat as one and a hundred minds with but a single thought--to
write the epic of those tiny, roundish, colorless, wandering cells
of our blood, those cells, which, smelling from afar the approach
of a murderous microbe, swam up the current of the blood, crawled
strangely through the walls of the blood vessels to do battle with
the germs and so guard us from death.
The great medical congresses of those brave days were exciting
debating societies about microbes, about immunity, and it was in
the weeks before a congress (Metchnikoff always went to them) that
his laboratory buzzed with an infernal rushing to and fro. “We must
hurry,” Metchnikoff exclaimed, “to make all of the experiments
necessary to support my arguments!” The crowd of adoring assistants
then slept two hours less each night; Metchnikoff rolled up his
sleeves, too, and seized a syringe. Young rhinoceros beetles, green
frogs, alligators, or weird Mexican axolotls were brought from the
animal house by the sweating helpers (sometimes the ponds were
dredged for perch and gudgeon). Then the mad philosopher, his eyes
alight, his broad face so red that it glowed like some smoldering
brush-fire under his beard, his mustaches full of bacilli spattered
into it by his excited and poetic gestures--this Metchnikoff, I say,
proceeded to inject swarms of microbes into one or another of his
uncomplaining, cold-blooded menagerie. “I multiply experiments to
support my theory of phagocytes!” he was wont to say.
VI
It is amazing, when you remember that his brain was always inventing
stories about nature, how often these stories turned out to be true
when they were put to the test of experiment. A German hunter had
claimed: “There is nothing to Metchnikoff’s theory of phagocytes.
Everybody knows that you can see microbes inside of phagocytes--they
have undoubtedly been gobbled up by the phagocytes. But these
wandering cells are not defenders, they are mere scavengers--they
will only swallow dead microbes!” The London Congress of 1891 was
drawing near; Metchnikoff shouted for some guinea-pigs, vaccinated
them with some cholera-like bacilli that his old friend, the
unfortunate Gamaléia, had discovered. Then, a week or so later, the
big-bearded philosopher shot some of these living, dangerous bacilli
into the bellies of vaccinated beasts. Every few minutes, during the
next hours, he ran slender glass tubes into their abdomens, sucked
out a few drops of the fluid there, and put it before the more or
less dirty lens of his microscope, to see whether the phagocytes of
the immune beasts were eating up Gamaléia’s bacilli. Presto! These
roundish crawling cells were crammed full of the microbes!
“Now I shall prove that these microbes inside the phagocytes are
still alive!” cried Metchnikoff. He killed the guinea-pig, slashed it
open, and sucked into another little glass tube some of the grayish
slime of wandering cells which had gathered in the creature’s belly
to make meals off the microbes. In a little while--for they are
very delicate when you try to keep them alive outside the body--the
phagocytes had died, burst open, and the _live_ bacilli they had
swallowed galloped out of them! Promptly, when Metchnikoff injected
them, these microbes that had been swallowed, murdered guinea-pigs
who were not immune.
By dozens of brilliant experiments of this kind, Metchnikoff forced
his opponents to admit that phagocytes, sometimes, can eat vicious
microbes. But the pitiful waste of this brainy Metchnikoff’s life
was that he was always doing experiments to defend an idea, and
not to find the hidden truths of nature. His experiments were
weird, they were often fantastically entertaining, but they were so
artificial--they were so far away from the point of what it is that
makes us immune. You would think that his brain, which seemed to be
able to hold all knowledge, would have dreamed of subtle tests to
find out just how it is that one child can be exposed to consumption
and never get it, while some carefully and hygienically raised young
girl dies from consumption at twenty. _There_ is the riddle of
immunity (and it is still completely a riddle!). “Oh! it is doubtless
due to the fact that her phagocytes are not working!” Metchnikoff
would have exclaimed, and then he might rush off to flabbergast
some opponent by proving that the phagocytes of an alligator eat up
typhoid fever bacilli--which never bother alligators anyway.
The devotion of the workers in his laboratory was amazing. They let
him feed them virulent cholera bacilli (even one of those pretty
inspirational girls swallowed them!) to prove that the blood has
nothing to do with our immunity to cholera. For years--he himself
said that it was an insanity of his--he was fond of toying with the
lives of his researching slaves, and the only thing that excused him
was his perfect readiness to risk death along with them. He swallowed
more tubes of cholera bacilli than any of them. In the midst of this
dangerous business, one of the assistants, Jupille, became violently
sick with real Asiatic cholera and Metchnikoff’s remorse was
immoderate. “I shall never survive the death of Jupille!” he moaned,
and Olga, that good wife, had to be on her guard day and night to
keep her famous husband from one of his (always fruitless) attempts
at suicide. At the end of these strange experiments, Metchnikoff
jabbed needles into the arms of the survivors, drew blood from them,
and triumphantly found that this blood did not protect guinea-pigs
from doses of virulent cholera germs. How he hated the idea of blood
having any importance! “Human cholera gives us another example,” he
wrote, “of a malady whose cure cannot be explained by the preventive
properties of the blood.”
When some more than ordinarily independent student would come
whispering to him that he had discovered a remarkable something about
blood, Metchnikoff became magnificent like Moses coming down off Mt.
Sinai--searchers for mere truth had a bad time in that laboratory,
and you can imagine the great dauntless champion of phagocytes
ordering a dissenter from his theory to be burned, and then weeping
inconsolably over him afterwards. But, just the same, Metchnikoff--so
great was the number of experiments made by an always changing crowd
of eager experimenters in his laboratory--this Metchnikoff was partly
responsible for the discovery of some of the most astounding virtues
of blood. For, in the midst of his triumphs, Jules Bordet came to
work with the master. This Bordet was the son of the schoolmaster
of the village of Soignies in Belgium. He was timid, he seemed
insignificant, he had careless ways and watery-blue, absent-minded
eyes--eyes that saw things nobody else was looking for. Bordet set
to work there, and right in the shadow of the master’s beard, while
the walls shook with the slogan “Phagocytes!”--the Belgian pried into
the mystery of how blood kills germs; he laid the foundation for
those astounding delicate tests which tell whether blood is human
blood, in murder cases. It was here too, that Bordet began the work
which led, years later, to the famous blood test for syphilis--the
Wassermann reaction. Metchnikoff was often annoyed with Bordet, but
he was proud of him too, and whenever Bordet found anything in blood
that was harmful to microbes, and might help to make people immune
to them, Metchnikoff consoled himself by inventing more or less
accurate experiments which showed that these microbe-killing things
came from the phagocytes, after all. Bordet did not remain long in
Metchnikoff’s laboratory....
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, when romantic microbe
hunting began to turn into a regular profession, recruited from good
steady law-abiding young doctors who were not prophets or reckless
searchers--in those days Metchnikoff’s bitter trials with people who
didn’t believe him began to be less terrible. He received medals and
prizes of money, and even the Germans clapped their hands and were
respectful when he walked majestically into some congress. A thousand
searchers had spied phagocytes in the act of gobbling harmful
germs--and although that did not explain at all why one man dies from
an attack of pneumonia microbes, while another breaks into a sweat
and gets better--just the same there is no doubt that pneumonia germs
are sometimes eaten and so got rid of by phagocytes. So Metchnikoff,
after you discount his amazing illogic, his intolerance, his
bullheadedness, really did discover a fact which may make life easier
for suffering mankind. Because, some day, a dreamer, an experimenting
genius like the absent-minded Bordet may come along--and he may solve
the riddle of why phagocytes sometimes gobble germs and sometimes do
not--he might even teach phagocytes always to eat them....
VII
At last Metchnikoff began really to be happy. His opponents were
partly convinced, and partly they stopped arguing with him because
they found it was no use--he could always experiment more tirelessly
than they, he could talk longer, he could expostulate more loudly.
So Metchnikoff, at the beginning of the twentieth century, sat down
to write a great book on all that he had found out about why we are
immune. It was an enormous treatise you would think it would take
a lifetime to write. It was written in a style Flaubert might have
envied. He made every one of the ten thousand facts in it vivid, and
every one of them was twisted prettily to prove his point. It is
a strange novel with a myriad of heroes--the wandering cells, the
phagocytes of all the animals of the earth.
His fame made him take a real delight in being alive. Twenty years
before, detesting the human race, sorry for himself, and hating life,
he had told Olga: “It is a crime to have children--no human being
should consciously reproduce himself.” But now that he had begun to
take delight in existence, the children of Sèvres, the suburb where
he lived, called him “Grandpa Christmas” as he patted their heads and
gave them candy. “Life is good!” he told himself. But how to hang
onto it, now that it was slipping away so fast? In only one way, of
course--by science!
“Disease is only an episode!” he wrote. “It is not enough to cure
(he had discovered no cures) ... it is necessary to find out what
the destiny of man is, and why he must grow old and die when his
desire to live is strongest.” Then Metchnikoff abandoned work on his
dead phagocytes and set out to found fantastic sciences to explain
man’s destiny, and to avoid it. To one of these, the science of old
age, he gave the sonorous name “Gerontology,” and he gave the name
“Thanatology” to the science of death. What awful sciences they were;
the ideas were optimistic; the observations he made in them were so
inaccurate that old Leeuwenhoek would have turned over in his grave
had he known about them; the experiments Metchnikoff made, to support
these sciences, would have caused Pasteur to foam with indignation
that he had ever welcomed this outlandish Russian to his laboratory.
And yet--and yet--the way really to prevent one of the most hideous
microbic diseases came out of them....
[Illustration: ÉLIE METCHNIKOFF]
Metchnikoff dreaded the idea of dying but knew that he and everybody
else would have to--so he set out to devise a hope (there was not one
particle of science in this) for an easy death. Somewhere in his vast
hungry readings, he had run across the report of two old ladies
who had become so old that they felt no more desire for life--they
wanted to die, just as all of us want to go to sleep at the end of
a hard day’s work. “Ha!” cried Metchnikoff, “that shows that there
is an instinct for death just as there is an instinct for sleep! The
thing to do is to find a way to live long enough in good health until
we shall really crave to die!”
Then he set out on a thorough search for more of such lucky old
ladies, he visited old ladies’ homes, he rushed about questioning old
crones, with their teeth out, who were too deaf to hear him. He went
all the way from Paris to Rouen to interview (on the strength of a
newspaper rumor) a dame reported to be a hundred and six. But, alas,
all of the oldsters he talked to were strong for life, he never found
any one like the two legendary old ladies. Just the same he cried:
“There is a death instinct!” Contrary facts never worried him.
He studied old age in animals; and people were always sending him
gray-haired dogs and dilapidated ancient cats; he published a solemn
research on why a superannuated parrot lived to be seventy. He owned
an ancient he-turtle, who lived in his garden, and Metchnikoff was
overjoyed when this venerable beast--at the great age of 86--mated
with two lady turtles and became the father of broods of little
turtles. He dreaded the passing of the delights of love, and
exclaimed, remembering his turtle: “Senility is not so profoundly
seated as we suppose!”
But to push back old age? What is at the bottom of it? A Scandinavian
scientist, Edgren, had made a deep study of the hardening of the
arteries--that was the cause of old age, suggested Edgren, and among
the causes of the hardening of the arteries were the drinking of
alcohol, syphilis, and certain other diseases.
“A man is as old as his arteries, that is true,” muttered
Metchnikoff, and he decided to study the riddle of how that
loathsome disease hardens the arteries. It was in 1903. He had just
received a prize of five thousand francs, and Roux--who, though
so different, so much more the searcher, had always stuck by this
wild Metchnikoff--Roux had got the grand Osiris prize of one hundred
thousand francs. Never were there two men so different in their ways
of doing science, but they were alike in caring little for money, and
together they decided to use all of these francs--and thirty thousand
more which Metchnikoff had wheedled out of some rich Russians--to
study that venereal plague, to attempt to give it to apes, to try
to discover its then mysterious virus, to prevent it, to cure it if
possible. And Metchnikoff wanted to study how syphilis hardened the
arteries.
So they bought apes with this money. French governors in the Congo
sent black boys to scour the jungles for them, and presently large
rooms at the Pasteur Institute were a-chatter with chimpanzees
and orang-outangs, and the cries of these were drowned out by the
shrieking of the sacred monkey of the Hindoos, and the caterwaulings
of the comical little _Macacus cynemolgus_.
Almost at once Roux and Metchnikoff made an important find; their
experiments were ingenious and they had about them a certain
tautness and clearness that was strangely un-Metchnikoffian. Their
laboratory began to be the haunt of unfortunate men who had just got
syphilis; from one of these they inoculated an ape--and the very
first experiment was a success. The chimpanzee developed the disease.
From then on, for more than four years they toiled, transmitting
the diseases from one ape to another, looking for the sneaking
slender microbe but not finding it, trying to find ways to weaken
the virus--as Pasteur had done with the unknown germ of rabies--in
order to discover a preventive vaccine. Their monkeys died miserably
of pneumonia and consumption, they got loose and ran away. While
Metchnikoff, not too deftly, scratched the horrible virus into them,
the apes bit him and scratched him back--and then Metchnikoff did a
strange and clever experiment. He scratched a little syphilitic virus
into the ear of an ape, and twenty-four hours later he cut off that
ear! The ape never showed one sign of the disease in any other part
of his body....
“That means,” cried Metchnikoff, “that the germ lingers for hours
at the spot where it gets into the body--now, as in men we know
exactly where the virus gets in, maybe we can kill it before it ever
spreads--since in this disease we know just when it gets in, too!”
So Metchnikoff, with Roux always being careful and insisting upon
good check experiments--so Metchnikoff, after all of his theorizing
about why we are immune, performed one of the most profoundly
practical of all the experiments of microbe hunting. He sat himself
down and invented the famous calomel ointment--that now is chasing
syphilis out of armies and navies the world over. He took two apes,
inoculated them with the syphilitic virus fresh from a man, and then,
one hour later, he rubbed the grayish ointment into that scratched
spot on one of his apes. He watched the horrid signs of the disease
appear on the unanointed beast, and saw all signs of the disease stay
away from the one that had got the calomel.
Then for the last time Metchnikoff’s strange insanity got hold
of him. He forgot his vows and induced a young medical student,
Maisonneuve, to volunteer to be scratched with syphilis from an
infected man. Before a committee of the most distinguished medical
men of France, this brave Maisonneuve stood up, and into six long
scratches he watched the dangerous virus go. It was a more severe
inoculation than any man would ever get in nature. The results of it
might make him a thing for loathing, might send him, insane, to his
death.... For one hour Maisonneuve waited, then Metchnikoff, full
of confidence, rubbed the calomel ointment into the wounds--but not
into those which had been made at the same time on a chimpanzee and
a monkey. It was a superb success, for Maisonneuve showed never a
sign of the ugly ulcer, while the simians, thirty days afterwards,
developed the disease--there was no doubt about it.
Moralists--and there were many doctors among these, mind you--raised
a great clamor against these experiments of Metchnikoff. “It will
remove the penalty of immorality!” said they, “to spread abroad
such an easy and a perfect means of prevention!” But Metchnikoff
only answered: “It has been objected that the attempt to prevent
the spread of this disease is immoral. But since all means of moral
prophylaxis have not prevented the great spread of syphilis and the
contamination of innocents, the immoral thing is to restrain any
available means we have of combating this plague.”
VIII
Meanwhile he was scheming and groping about and having dreams about
other things that might cause the arteries to harden, and suddenly
he invented another cause--surely no one can say he discovered
it!--“auto-intoxication, poisoning from the wild, putrefying bacilli
in our large intestines--that is surely a cause of the hardening of
the arteries, that is what helps us to grow old too soon!” he cried.
He devised chemical tests--what awful ones they were--that would show
whether the body was being poisoned from the intestine. “We would
live much longer,” he said, “if we had no large intestine, indeed,
two people are on record, who had their large intestine cut out, and
live perfectly well without it.” Strange to say, he did not advocate
cutting the bowels out of every one, but he set about thinking up
ways of making things there uncomfortable for the “wild bacilli.”
His theory was a strange one, and caused laughter and jeers and he
began to get into trouble again. People wrote in, reminding him that
elephants had enormous large intestines but lived to be a hundred in
spite of them; that the human race, in spite of its large intestine,
was one of the longest-lived species on earth. He engaged in vast
obscene arguments about why evolution has allowed animals to keep
a large intestine--then suddenly he hit on his great remedy for
auto-intoxication. There were villages in Bulgaria where people
were alleged to live to be more than a hundred. Metchnikoff didn’t
go down there to see--he believed it. These ancient people lived
principally upon sour milk, so went the story. “Ah! there’s the
explanation,” he muttered. He put the youngsters in his laboratory
to studying the microbe that made milk sour--and in a little while
the notorious Bulgarian bacillus made its bow in the rank of patent
medicines.
“This germ,” explained Metchnikoff, “by making the acid of sour milk,
will chase the wild poisonous bacilli out of the intestine.” He began
drinking huge draughts of sour milk himself, and later, for years, he
fed himself cultivations of the Bulgarian bacillus. He wrote large
books about his new theory and a serious English journal acclaimed
them to be the most important scientific treatises since Darwin’s
“Origin of Species.” The Bulgarian bacillus became a rage, companies
were formed, and their directors grew rich off selling these silly
bacilli. Metchnikoff let them use his name (though Olga insists he
never made a franc from that) for the label.
For nearly twenty years Metchnikoff austerely lived to the letter of
his new theory. He neither drank alcoholic drinks nor did he smoke.
He permitted himself no debaucheries. He was examined incessantly by
the most renowned specialists of the age. His rolls were sent to him
in separate sterilized paper bags so that they would be free from the
wild, auto-intoxicating bacilli. He constantly tested his various
juices and excretions. In those years he got down untold gallons
of sour milk and swallowed billions of the beneficent bacilli of
Bulgaria....
And he died at the age of seventy-one.