Ilya Ilyich Mechnikov

From Freepedia

Ilya Ilyich Mechnikov (Илья Ильич Мечников) (also known as Eli Metchnikoff) (May 16, 1845, Ukraine – July 16, 1916, Paris) was a Russian microbiologist best remembered for his pioneering research into the immune system. Mechnikov received the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1908, for his work on phagocytosis.

Mechnikov was born in a village near Kharkoff in Russia (now Kharkiv in the Ukraine), the son of an officer in the Russian Imperial Guard. He went to the University of Kharkoff to study natural sciences completing his four-year degree in just two years. He then went to Germany to study marine fauna on the small North Sea island of Heligoland and then at the University of Giessen, University of Göttingen and then at Munich Academy. In 1867 he returned to Russia to the appointment of docent at the new University of Odessa (now in the Ukraine), followed by an appointment at the University of St. Petersburg. In 1970 he returned to Odessa to take up the appointment of Titular Professor of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy.

His first wife, Ludmilla Feodorovitch, suffered from tuberculosis, of which she died in 1873. Her death, combined with other problems, caused Mechnikov to unsuccessfully attempt suicide, taking a large dose of opium. He married again in 1875, and his second wife, Olga, caught typhoid in 1880, causing Metchnikoff to again attempt suicide - this time by injecting himself with relapsing fever, which didn't kill him, but made him very ill.

In 1882 he resigned his position at Odessa University and set up a private laboratory at Messina to study comparative embryology, where he discovered the phagocytosis after experimenting on the larvae of starfish.

Mechnikov returned to Odessa as director of an institute set up to carry out Louis Pasteur's vaccine against rabies, but due to some difficulties left in 1888 and went to Paris to seek Pasteur's advice. Pasteur gave him an appointment at the Pasteur Institute, where he remained for the rest of his life.