In 1899, Elie Metchnikoff woke up in Paris to learn that he had defeated old age. At least, that’s what the newspaper headlines said. Before long he was inundated with mail from people begging him to help them live forever. The only problem? He didn’t know how to do it.
At the time, Metchnikoff was one of the world’s most famous scientists. And he believed aging was a disease he could cure. He dedicated his life to that quest, spending his days interviewing centenarians, pulling gray hair out of colleagues and old dogs, and boiling strawberries — all in the pursuit of eternal youth. If you’ve ever had yogurt for breakfast, you likely have Metchnikoff to thank.
Today on the show: Elie Metchnikoff’s quest, his life — and his death
This message comes from NPR sponsor Capital 1 the capital 1 Venture X business card earns unlimited double miles on every purchase Capital 1 what’s in your wallet terms and conditions apply find out more at Capital 1.com venturex business around 200 BC China’s first emperor chin sha hang feared death so
Badly that he sent an alchemist on voyages across the sea to search for a magic Elixir that would give him Immortality after The Alchemist disappeared at Sea the legend says the emperor took things into his own hands and died after drinking what he thought was a cure around 200 years later another Legend was Born a Holy Grail that was thought to hold life restoring powers for anyone who drank from it there was the philosopher stone the Fountain of Youth and then in late December of 189 9 a scientist named Eli mechnikov woke up in Paris to learn that he had done it he
Had found the secret to eternal life the French morning newspaper latan carried a huge headline in large block letters all across the front page and it said Viv Long Live Life underneath that headline it said things like the elixir of Eternal youth The Institute of Miracles old age
Defeated none of us should despair to see the year 2000 will reach the age of the Patriarchs and M mikov will be damned only by hirs or fortunes Eli mechnikov had captured the world’s attention for Millennia people had tried to evade death seeking cures and things like Mercury gold powders liquids but now
They had a new tool science and it was miraculous there were new vaccines x-rays had just been invented you could now see what had once been invisible and mechnikov had helped to make that happen He was very famous he was one of the most famous scientists in the world Eli mechnikov was Hardcore the man drank CA in the name of science he injected himself with disease and he tested the body’s power and its limits later in his career his work on the
Immune system would win him a Nobel Prize when the world was sick Eli mednikov tried to cure it and he made sure people knew he loved the journalist he never turned them away and they loved him even more than he loved them and they followed him around and
They they took down his every word and his message was clear he thought that a solution to everything was science so of course science was uh going to solve aging as well aging is a disease that should be treated like any other no one had studied aging scientifically before and here was this
Famous scientist saying he wanted to take it on but mednikov didn’t just want to study aging he wanted to cure it this became for him like new Mission science alone can lead suffering Humanity into the right path free the world from this terrible fliction and the world ate it
Up entire sacks of letters that piled up in the mail room was stuffed with letters from people who didn’t want to die nobody likes to die no nobody likes to see their friends and family die so we want to extend the lifespan as much as possible people nowadays want to
Remain ageless we can delay aging it’s one of the foundational questions in science we can stop aging how long can we live we keep searching what is it exactly we’re looking for I don’t know what I want to do living to 200 or are we looking to living to you know 95 with
Our senses and being active and in control I think the most important thing to me is maintaining my Mobility I would love to like renovate I think I want to travel more traveling as much as I can more time to myself we all know that
Winter is coming for us I have about 20 25 years left the question is when and can we push it out as much as possible people have been talking about it for thousands of years it’s not a new question it’s an old question since the beginning of human civilization people have been obsessed
With staying young even living forever today that obsession is tied up with media medicine and money so I got this STW on Amazon and it literally is the best we spend billions of dollars on Anti-aging products it doesn’t cause wrinkles you can easily drink out from
The top of it we’re told to look younger the top 10 celebrities who have aged badly we question whether older people are fit to lead poll after poll has shown that many voters are worried about the age of the two likely nominees but what if these are the wrong questions is
Aging something we even need to cure and what does it mean if we can’t I’m ramtin AR I’m Rand abdat on this episode of through line we’re not going to answer the question of Aging but we are going to tell you the story of someone who tried coming up our producer Devin kyama
Tells the story of Eli mnov hello my name is sa chrai I’m calling from Austin Texas and you are listening to Trine NPR this message comes from NPR sponsor Paramount plus Ruth Wilson and Daryl mccormic star in a new Showtime original series inspired by true events the woman
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Squarespace part one This Love Of Life the country is neither beautiful nor Rich steps Helix covered with low grasses and wild warm wood a poor Village meager vegetation no River the whole impression is a Melancholy one in the middle of the 19th century Ilia Ivanovich and his wife and children
Left St Petersburg Russia for the countryside but what boundless space but soft silver gray coloring and in the mornings and evenings what fresh cool air it was here on a little slice of land outside the main village that they would welcom their fifth child into the
World though they wish to have no more children one more child was born on the 16 May 1845 Eli mechnikov these descriptions of Eli metchnikoff’s early life are from the biography his wife olgo wrote about him fair and slander with silky hair and a diaphanous pink and white complexion he had small
Gray blue eyes full of kindliness and Sparkle he had a few brothers and sisters and out of all of them he was probably the most curious he was so Restless that he went by the name of Quick Silver he always wished to see everything to know everything and found his way
Everywhere as a kid he was always chasing bugs and you looking at what bugs do he could only be kept quiet when his curiosity was awakened by observation of some natural object such as an insect or a butterfly then he would invite all of his siblings and cousins for a a lecture
In natural history and he would actually pay them out of his pocket money to come and listen to his lectures this is Lena zeldovich she’s currently a sign science and medical journalist in New York City but she grew up in the former Soviet Union where Eli mechnikov was a
Household name so I learned that name at a very young age she remembers hearing about his famous discoveries the same way you might learned about Albert Einstein’s eals MC square he was like a new cherish name a big name a couple of research institutions were named after
Him we definitely knew about him growing up mechnikov was born in a time and place when medicine was only just starting to modernize the human body wasn’t really understood and diseases like chaler and typhoid were really scary many doctors still believed in bloodletting and would actually treat patients with toxic substances like
Mercury and Lead so medical care itself was basically synonymous with suffering from a very young age I think he had this desire to alleviate human suffering and that that’s how he sort of found his way into biological research so mechnikov grows up to become a zoologist and he couldn’t have picked a better
Time because when he was just 14 years old a new Theory rocked the scientific World Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution 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
And he dedicated his early career to researching that theory when he was in his late 30s he uh traveled to Italy to to the island of Sicily to study marine animals and he was studying The larva of starfish this is Luba vonsky she’s a science writer at The vitman Institute of Science in
Israel and I’ve written a book called immunity how Eli mechnikov changed the course of modern medicine this trip to sicy would change everything for mechnikov he and his wife were staying by the seaside in a cottage overlooking the bright blue Ms straight the straight was home to all sorts of marine
Creatures and while his wife went out to explore Sicily mechnikov would spend long days holed up in the cottage staring at jars filled with seawater and Tiny organisms one day he had his eye pressed up against his microscope peering inside these minuscule starfish larvae and in the larvae he saw mobile
Cells these were cells that wandered inside the larvae gobbling up food and other particles mechnikov had seen these cells in action before but that day watching them go about their business it struck [Laughter] him he came up with the idea that maybe this is a defensive force of the
Organism sensing that my hunch concealed something particularly interesting I became so excited that I began striding up and down the room he performed an experiment it’s a very famous experiment in Immunology where he inserted Thorns into this larvae if the cells attacked the thorn as a foreign Invader his theory would be
Correct and he saw that the cells indeed ganged up on the Thorns this was for him evidence of his theory that they they were there to protect the larva watching this unfold through his microscope his mind was blown in fact this was the the first material evidence of uh inner healing
Forces in in science the invisible had become visible mikov wasn’t the first person to observe this healing Force but he was the first person to defe Define it as an immune response this was the work that would later earn him a Nobel Prize the idea that the body has inner powers that can
Be you know studied and uh enhanced and uh understood I mean that’s enormous it just turned everything around around the turn of the century while mechnikov was consumed by his work on immunity another question started to nag at him he was living in Paris and working at the pastor Institute the
Pastor Institute was home to the miracle makers of the day scientists who were researching vaccination or figuring out what caused plague 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
Our strong will to live runs count to the infirmities of old age and the shortness of life that’s greatest disharmony of human nature life expectancy at the time was around the mid-40s so he must have had a growing sense of his own mortality but he wasn’t just concerned about himself
In his mind aging was one of the greatest problems facing humankind the fact that we all grow older and that aging meant sickness until death and he was appalled to discover how little was known about uh aging and that there was no systematic study of Aging there were textbooks about
Diseases of old age but not about old age itself and mechnikov comes up with this Theory an idea that would stay with him throughout his entire life his Hope was that if people live long enough they will develop this death Instinct the death instinct this Instinct must be accompanied by
Marvelous Sensations better than any other we are capable of experiencing death Instinct would mean that people would be happy to die after living a long and healthy lives perhaps the anxious search for the purpose of human life is nothing but a vague yearning for this anticipation of natural death as he
Went around looking for this death instant he became so obsessed with figuring out how older people felt as they approached death that he would literally chase the elderly down centenarians made it into the newspapers so whenever he would see an article about an old person he rushed to meet
Them and he wanted to ask them you know about if if they wanted to die so this is late 19th century we’re going through a transformation from The Agrarian economic system to the industrial economic system this is Carol habber she’s a professor and Dean amera of tlane University in the school of
Liberal arts I was trained as a medical and social historian and I focused largely on the history of Aging Carol says she doesn’t think there was ever a time when old age was seen as something wonderful that everyone respected but around the time mechnikov turned his attention to aging there was a cultural
Shift happening in how people viewed it if you look at the late 19th century the image of the old person is hunched over with a cane sitting in a rocking chair it’s pretty negative at that time the Industrial Revolution was changing how families lived and worked and in this
Work Revolution the elderly were getting left behind you had the feeling that there wasn’t this basis of support and that people going to end up in what they call the industrial scrap peep they couldn’t keep up they couldn’t learn new skills and so they were going to become
Oxens Western society’s view whether it was true or not was that the elderly weren’t compatible with the increasingly fast-paced World caring for the elderly came to be seen as a burden many elderly people ended up living the rest of their days in a hospital and that’s exactly where mechnikov went to find
Them he went to this uh large French hospital laal petrier laa petrier was an Infamous Hospital in Paris it had long doubled as a psychiatric ward and a home for the elderly and most of them were poor because you know obviously more wealthy elderly wouldn’t make it there for a lot
Of cians it was a dark distant presence looming over the city inside its imposing brick walls was a massive sprawling complex that for centuries had been a place of squalor and suffering a famous French neurologist referred to it as La Versa de la dler the Versa of pain
Probably must have been quite a uh quite a sad place you know where all these people were brought to die and there was not much that could really be done for them but it was the perfect laboratory for mednikov he went around asking them what they wanted and he was hoping to find
The death Instinct and he was really disappointed because even the sick old people they didn’t want to die they wanted to get better I discovered that one and all felt as if they were continually being threatened by death as if they were convicts awaiting the day of execution
At the S the great ambition of women of 80 is to leave to 100 and the desire to live is almost Universal even in a miserable place like Salat Trier people wanted to live longer what is This Love of life that makes death so Terrible he developed the whole philosophy that uh there was this big disharmony in the world you know in nature between the shortness of human life and and people’s desire to live mechnikov came to believe that aging was a disease and he was sure that science could cure it he envisioned a
Utopic future where medicine could prolong life up to 150 years at that age he thought the death Instinct would finally appear so he went all in this became for him like this his new mission to free the world from this you know this terrible Affliction coming up mechnikov heads
Back to the lab with a new mission to extend human life to 150 Years Hello this is Nancy Smith and I’m in K Germany uh you’re listening to through line from NPR it’s a great show I love it keep up the good work we just want to take a moment to shout out our through line plus subscribers thank you so much for your
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Episodes from NPR shows like this one you can find out more at plus. npr.org part two trusting his Gut in his 20s Eli mechnikov had been visited by death his first wife died of tuberculosis it’s a disease that kills you slowly you can basically watch your loved one wither Away day after day month after month you they travel to places with better climate milder Winters sunnier places and nothing helped and she eventually died this sent mechnikov into a deep depression and then a decade later he went through it again his second wife uh contracted typhoid fever and it looked like you
Know she could die and so he inoculated himself with some kind of a TIG born disease thinking that they will die together but neither one of them Died and this changed everything from mechnikov after his recovery he had a Renaissance of vital intensity the life Instinct developed in him in a high degree his health became flourishing his energy and power for work greater than ever and the pessimism of his youth began to pale before the optimistic dawn of his
Maturity fast forward a couple of decades it’s the early 1900s the now famous aov set out to Pioneer the study of aging and cure it he wants people to be able to live happy and healthy until they’re ready to die the purpose of human existence lies in going through a
Normal cycle of Life leading to a loss of the life Instinct and a painless old age bringing about a reconciliation with death by now he’s a superstar at the pastor Institute which was one of of the most prestigious science facilities in the world at the time it’s sort of a
Scientist’s dream he has lab assistants facilities all the resources he could imagine at his fingertips and it gets to work his lab gradually filled up with the old animals of All Sorts there are mice and rats and geese and cats and dogs there’s this 87y old turtle and a
70-year-old parrot mov was very happy that he was still in interested in females and that’s just the beginning he starts pulling out hair from an old Great Dane from a coworker and then from his own head to figure out why it’s turning gray and remember he’s a renowned immunologist with kind of a
Savior complex so he’s also spreading the gospel to everyone he knows when he wrode on public transportation he would tell people how they should be careful about microbes he boiled everything he ate H even strawberries and even peeled bananas he thought that the skin probably didn’t protect them well enough uhuh and when
He invited guests to restaurants he asked to bring a burner and he he sterilized the utensils okay so maybe he’s not like the most fun guy to have around but this is the beginning of the science of Aging of gerentology which by the way was a term that mechnikov coined in
1903 and science is all about making mistakes so you can find that one thing that works and as he’s conducting all these experiments he zeros in on this one idea that the body was being poisoned he thought that the root of Aging that it all started in the intestines specifically the large
Intestine the large intestine must be regarded as one of the organ possessed by man and yet harmful to his health and his life the presence of large intestine in the human body is the cause of a series of misfortunes the idea that something bad was happening in the intestines is one
That dates back thousands of years so this wasn’t necessarily a new idea but in the late 19th century it was making a comeback because science was making new links to germs and disease at the time the human intestine was viewed as a sess of uh all sorts of
Toxins I guess the proof that all the scientists had was know hey just look what comes out of your rear end um any more questions so mik thought that in the intestines there are microbes that cause rotting and that the rotting is what really causes the deterioration of
Aging the big question became how to fight that then one day he has a breakthrough he learned that in Bulgaria there is this entire population of centenarians in the mountains remember mikov is obsessed with centenarians and there were newspaper articles backing up this idea that people in this region of
Bulgaria were living a long time and so he had to know why yogurt yogurt they ate lots of yogurt mechnikov had to tell everyone it’s 1904 Paris a crowded lecture hall at the Society of French agriculturalists the famous Eli mechnikov is the guest speaker the lecture was called old
Age and he starts by getting up there and rattling off some pretty dark ideas he was saying how in Europe old people are miserable their lives often become very difficult unable to fulf fulfill any useful role in the family or in the community old people are considered a very heavy
Burden he claimed they were more likely to commit suicide or be murdered one is shocked by the quantity of murders committed against the elderly notably against elderly women he also repeated without evidence by the way that some cultures killed and ate their women because they’re useless and he said that
People there say that all dogs can at least capture seals and old women can’t even do that he was painting a very sort of gruesome picture of old age mechnikov is straddling the line between serious science and being a Salesman because he’s still trying to sell the world on
Science so he’s playing to his audience stoking the fears of Aging that are growing at the time and then saying hey don’t worry science has the solution he brought an old dog and a parrot the dog was 17 and he looked very old in indicate and and the parrot who was 70
Looked much younger than than the dog and then mechnikov lays down in science birds do not have such a large intestines as mammals they don’t store as many microbes and he says if we can find a way to prolong that decay in our intestines then maybe we can prolong it
In the rest of our bodies and then he says maybe there’s a solution because you know in area people live that long it is interesting to point out that this microb is found in sour milk consumed in large quantities by bulgarians in a region renowned for the longevity of its
Inhabitants it connected all these dots together we age because in the intestines there is rotting and lactic acid that is produced in sour milk can stop this rotting by killing the bacteria that caused the rotting and there you have proof all over the world the know newspaper started running running
Stories the Chicago Daily Tribune SAR milk is elixir secret of long life discovered by professor mechnikov and there was no turning back drink sour milk and live to be 180 years old I mean this started a real Mania yogurt Mania the London Telegraph The Washington Post
People who wish to live to 100 breakfast off of yogurt exclusively that one lecture Luis says started a global yogurt Trend that still exists today I think it’s rare to trace the beginning of an industry to a single event but in this case I can pretty much
I can say you know that the yogurt industry started with that lecture much later we’d find out that yogurt was probably not the only reason people in that region of Bulgaria live so long but it didn’t really matter Pharmacy started stocking yogurt doctors recommended it to patients people used it as a
Disinfectant or preparation for surgery even to treat some diseases this stuff was all over the place there were adds this Cafe on one of the Parisian boulevards advertised Bulgarian curled milk the yogurt crease kind of you know grew and grew I saw pictures of denona which I think in the states is called
Danon yeah Danon yogurt I mean I don’t even know how many different brands of yogurt we have today but Don is still there even breakfast cereal Pioneer John Harvey Kellogg reached out to mechnikov his face was everywhere they sold cups of yogurt and it said recommended by professor mikov and the medical Profession it was totally got out of hand completely there was all this hype and all this hoopla about it that he had no control over this wasn’t exactly what mechnikov 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 he tried sort of to present the facts and to separate it from the Hye but it was just way too late good thing about yogurt was that it was harmless you know because so many
Cures for aging were you know terrible and dangerous and lethal and yogurt was cheap and it was safe and easily available so it was Irresistible mechnikov 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 mechnikov 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
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Unnoticed for years listen to Ripple wherever you listen to podcasts part three winter is coming it was at dawn that we reached the little railway station where it carriage had come to meet us on a cloudy May morning in 1909 Eli mednikov bow tie and gray coat
And his wife Olga white blouse Straw Hat descend from an overnight train we were excited by the side of the Russian country cool Meadows Forest Fields all that simple Landscapes that we had not seen for so long and we were also greatly moved at the idea of meeting
Tolto mechnikov has returned to Russia where he was born to visit the writer and philosopher Leo tolto so he was looking to sort of to Solve the Riddle of aging on all levels he was looking for partners in this Quest I had long wanted to get to know Toto closer learning in person what he really thought about Universal issues that had fascinated me since my youth especially the basis of morality the meaning of life and the inevitability of its end he admired so much Toto’s writing about
The fear of death which are really masterful a man can be master of nothing while ever he fears death and the man that fears not death possesses everything without suffering a man would know not his limits so he thought that too must know some secret that I don’t
This wasn’t just some random meeting Al although the two had never met their work had been in conversation for years Tolstoy was critical of metchnikoff’s work and through shade on science in general scientists can tell useful Knowledge from useless they study such topics as the sexual organs of the amiba
Only because this allows them to live like Lords and mechnikov had written responses about Tolstoy warning of the dangers of discarding Science and embracing just spirituality in certain cases his teaching had caused young researchers to drop science burn their dissertations and join communes to start a new
Life now it’s time to talk face to face mechnikov had Minds now he needed hearts at to to’s estate mechnikov 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 reporter
Called it a meeting of two monarchs of universal literature and science the two spend the day together debating science versus religion debating as they ride in a carriage debating after listening to Piano Works by chopan debating over tea I highly value genuine science one that is interested in man his fate and
Happiness any ideal that may be capable of uniting mankind in some religion or the future must be based on scientific principles for mechnikov Science and reasoning always key for Tolstoy morals above all if we are going to submit everything to reasoning we can arrive at the most absur nonsense I dare say in
That case it would be possible justify cannibalism progress doesn’t necessarily have to be based on people’s love for one another when it came to mechnikov current work on Aging the trouble is not that our life is too short but that will leave badly contrary to our own
Conscience so the only thing on which they agreed was yogurt because the story turned out loved yogurt uh but other than that uh it was pretty much a disaster the meeting M of very candidly very honestly wrote about this himself afterwards talto noted that at the end
Of the day our World Views coincide but with this difference he takes a spiritual perspective and I take a material one meso was much more spiritual than tooy gave him credit for he did try I think understand human psychology and I think he thought that somehow together
With tolto he could get closer to cracking this riddle of you know what really happens in the human psyche in the human mind how you know we feel like that how we feel when we age why you know this fear of death and of course it just you know
Totally crashed you know meeting it didn’t work at all and tolto menn’s dispute of science versus religion fit into this larger European debate at the time over how to view and improve life at the turn of the 20th century this was a very dominant dichotomy between pessimism and
Optimism of sort of your belief you know about the world you is is the world getting better for tolto the answer answer was no some morality love and faith in the Here and Now was the most important but mechnikov 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 in some of the Russian newspapers he was bragging about how good he felt he was saying that this is working look you know I’m eating yogurts three times a day I believe you know it’s
Doing me a lot of good and uh look how vigorous I Am 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 assassin’s bullet strikes down Arch Duke Ferdinand of Austria Germany declares war on Russia England declares war on Germany 25,000 dead and wounded
Peace refused by France war declared all Europe in turmoil what really killed him uh was the World War I he was such a believer in rational thought in science he thought that there will be no more Wars know that the world had learned from that and he was devastated when uh
War broke out and all science stopped at the pastor Institute over 100 people at the pastor Institute get recruited to the war effort his wife describes it like how overnight he turned into an old man he could not bear the idea now a terrible reality that This brilliant
Young lives should be sacrificed 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 right to live longer and live healthier until they felt ready to go the idea that humans would willfully create so Much Death crushed him the contrast between his aspiration and the cruel reality had been to him a blow which his sensitive and suffering heart
Was not fit to bear in 1916 so this is already what like more than a year after the war started his health began be began to deteriorate and he developed heart disease heart failure in terms of the fear of death he kept coming back to this and he kept
Saying that I have conquered my fear of death I have conquered it and the truth is that you end up feeling the exact opposite because had it been true I don’t think he would have had the need to repeat it so many times so it was obviously something that he was still
Struggling with I think till the end end of his his life let all those who expected me to live 100 years or longer forgive me my premature death so he died from a heart attack And the moments before he died he asked his assistant to carefully look into his intestines and see what’s there once he was gone he died in 1916 at 71 not even halfway to the 150 that he thought you know people should live many people were all over the world were
Disappointed there were headlines saying you know what have you done you know we believed you know because even despite all the skepticism uh I think people wanted to believe that maybe it’s true maybe he has found a a recipe a Cure What’s a secret to a good life I don’t know what I want to do I don’t know what I want to Do I want to have a baby aging is not inevitable anymore companies are betting big money on it if we can slow aging enough then we will be happy if you’re concerned about preventing or minimizing the signs of aging then this video is these are the nine anti-aging Foods want make slow
Down the aging [Applause] process you know we should all be so lucky to age and grow old and and get to experience this part of life when you try and imagine it when you’re younger you you think you may not want to be there because you get these images in your head of being bent over
You know using these Walkers and you don’t want that to happen to you but once you get out here you know you look around and you go hey nothing’s different I’m just older this is J shansky professor of Public Health at the University of Illinois Chicago he’s
One one of the people today following in Eli metchnikoff’s footsteps been working in the field of Aging for almost 40 years 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 mechnikov would have
Turned 150 Jay made a bet basically the BET was all about whether or not anyone alive in the year 200000 would be alive in the year 2150 could science keep someone alive and until they’re 150 years old my good friend thought that it was possible and and I said no it’s not
Possible the process of living itself leads to the degradation The Continuous degradation that ultimately leads to the demise of mind or body and we have components of the body that don’t replicate muscle fibers brain neurons parts of our bodies that power on life and degrade as you age those are our
Achilles heels so we can’t get these bodies to last that long unless we turn the engine of Life off and when you turn the engine of Life off you’re dead but Jay believes in the promise of science it’s taken us so far already people live much longer than they did in
Metchnikoff’s day Jay thinks science will take us even farther so that we can live healthier longer do I know which one of these interventions is going to succeed no I don’t know all we need is one that does the human desire to beat aging began way before mechnikov and will
Likely last way after J nobody likes to die so we want to extend the lifespan as much as possible and health span as much as possible kind of just how mnik envisioned um and uh with that goal we keep searching winter will will come for me
Uh it will come for all of us the question is when and what can we do to to do what’s the most important thing in my view which is to enjoy life while we’re here um we only get to go through this journey once uh and um you know for
Humans it’s about 29 to 30,000 days that’s all we get um it you know varies but that’s it 29 to 30,000 days that’s that’s it though in some ways some of us get more than that Eli mechnikov wasn’t able to beat aging but he’s still with us in fridges and on breakfast tables
Everywhere that’s it for this week’s show I’m Rand ABD fat I’m Ram Arab and you’ve been listening to through line from NPR this episode was produced by me and me and Lawrence woo Julie Kane Ana Steinberg Casey Miner Christina Kim Devin kyama Peter balanon Rosen Thomas Lou Irene nuchi thanks to lesie Koff
Susan Evans Sam Evans Carol hacker Stefan hubenov and anandita poo also thanks to Sasha Sola Sahar kerki ardam gnof Peter balanan Rosen Ana Steinberg Thomas Lou and lauron laser for their voiceover work factchecking for this episode was done by Kevin vocal this episode was mixed by Maggie luar
Thanks to yanas Dury eth chapen Colin Campbell and Ana Grint music was composed by ramtin and his band drop electric which includes Ana misani naid Marvy show fujiwara and finally if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show please write us at through line at mpr.org thanks for Listening support for NPR and the following message come from TIAA on a Mission with wlef Jean to give back with wcf’s new record paper write with TIAA streams turn into donations to a nonprofit that teaches students how to invest stream now wherever you get your music support for NPR and the following
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