00:13The Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine, 1908.
00:20Ilya Ilyich Mechnikov was born on May 15, 1845, in a village near Kharkov in Russia.
00:28He was the son of an officer of the Imperial Guard, who was a landowner in the Ukraine steppes.
00:34Mechnikov went to school at Kharkov and was, even when he was a little boy, passionately interested in natural history,
00:43on which he used to give lectures to his small brothers and to other children.
00:48He was, at that time, especially interested in botany and geology.
00:53When he left school, he went to the University of Kharkov to study natural sciences,
01:01and worked there so hard that he was able to complete the four-year course in two years.
01:07Graduating at Kharkov, he went, first to study marine fauna, at Heligoland, and then to the University of Gießen, where he worked under Leukot.
01:19Subsequently, he went to the University of Göttingen and the Munich Academy, where he worked in von Siebold's laboratory.
01:28While he was at Gießen, he discovered, in 1865, intracellular digestion in one of the flatworms, an observation which was to influence his later discoveries.
01:42In 1867, he returned to Russia, having been appointed docent at the new University of Odessa.
01:50And from there, he went to take up a singular appointment at the University of St. Petersburg.
01:56But in 1870, he was appointed titular professor of zoology and comparative anatomy at the University of Odessa.
02:05It was in Odessa, in fact, that he met his second wife, Olga, whom he married in 1875.
02:12He then went to Messina to continue, in a private laboratory he set up there, his work on comparative embryology.
02:20And it was here that he discovered the phenomenon of phagocytosis, with which his name will always be associated.
02:29Returning to Odessa, Mechnikov visited Vienna on the way, and explained his ideas to Klaus, professor of zoology there.
02:38And it was Klaus who suggested the term phagocyte for the mobile cells which act in this way.
02:45Ultimately, in 1883, Mechnikov gave, at Odessa, his first paper on phagocytosis.
02:54During this period, Mechnikov was appointed director of the institute, established in 1886 in Odessa, to vaccinate Pasteur with a rabies vaccine.
03:05But local hostility to this treatment was significant.
03:09Mechnikov discovered that, partly due to the fact that he was not a medical professional, the circumstances became so complicated,
03:17that in 1888 he left Odessa, and went to Paris to ask Pasteur for his advice.
03:26Pasteur gave him a lab, and made an appointment at the Pasteur Institute.
03:32Here, he remained until the end of his life.
03:35During this period, he published several articles and two volumes on the comparative pathology of inflammation,
03:43and his treatise entitled Immunity to Infections.
03:48In 1908, he was awarded, along with Paul Elric, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
03:56In addition to his work, he, along with Roux, proved that syphilis can be transmitted to monkeys.
04:05Mechnikov received many distinctions, among which were honorary doctoral dissertations, Cambridge University,
04:13Copley Medal of the Royal Society, of which he was a foreign member,
04:18an honorary membership of the Medical Academy in Paris,
04:22and the Academies of Sciences and Medicine in St. Petersburg.
04:27In addition, he was a corresponding member of several other companies,
04:31and a foreign member of the Swedish Medical Society.
04:35Since 1913, Mechnikov began to suffer from heart attacks,
04:40and although for some time he rallied and recovered from the disaster caused by the War of 1914-1918,
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