Devin Katayama
Appearances
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We The People: Cruel and Unusual Punishment
The clause seems to express a great deal of humanity on which account I have no objection to it. But as it seems to have no meaning in it, I do not think it necessary. What is meant by the terms excessive bail? Who are to be the judges? What is understood by excessive fines? It lies with the court to determine. No cruel and unusual punishment is to be inflicted.
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We The People: Cruel and Unusual Punishment
It is sometimes necessary to hang a man. Villains often deserve whipping and perhaps having their ears cut off. But are we, in future, to be prevented from inflicting these punishments because they are cruel? If a more lenient mode of correcting vice and deterring others from the commission of it could be invented, it would be very prudent in the legislature to adopt it.
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We The People: Cruel and Unusual Punishment
But until we have some security that this will be done, we ought not to be restrained from making necessary laws by any declaration of this kind.
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We The People: Cruel and Unusual Punishment
Solitary is a total degradation of a human life.
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History of the Self: Aging
And Metchnikoff comes up with this theory, an idea that would stay with him throughout his entire life.
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History of the Self: Aging
He became so obsessed with figuring out how older people felt as they approached death that he would literally chase the elderly down.
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History of the Self: Aging
This is Carol Haber. She's a professor and Dean Emerita of Tulane University in the School of Liberal Arts.
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History of the Self: 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 Metchnikoff turned his attention to aging, there was a cultural shift happening in how people viewed it.
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History of the Self: Aging
At that time, the Industrial Revolution was changing how families lived and worked. And in this work revolution, the elderly were getting left behind.
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History of the Self: Aging
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 Metchnikoff went to find them.
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History of the Self: Aging
La Sapetrière was an infamous hospital in Paris. It had long doubled as a psychiatric ward and a home for the elderly.
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History of the Self: Aging
For a lot of Parisians, 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 Le Versailles de la Douleur. The Versailles of Pain.
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History of the Self: Aging
Even in a miserable place like Salpêtrière, people wanted to live longer.
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History of the Self: Aging
Metchnikoff 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.
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History of the Self: Aging
Coming up, Metchnikoff heads back to the lab with a new mission, to extend human life to 150 years.
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History of the Self: Aging
This sent Metchnikoff into a deep depression. And then a decade later, he went through it again.
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History of the Self: Aging
Fast forward a couple of decades. It's the early 1900s. The now famous Metchenkoff 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.
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History of the Self: Aging
By now, he's a superstar at the Pasteur Institute, which was one 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 he gets to work.
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History of the Self: Aging
There are mice and rats and geese and cats and dogs. There's this 87-year-old turtle and a 70-year-old parrot.
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History of the Self: Aging
And that's just the beginning. He starts pulling out hair from an old Great Dane, from a co-worker, 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.
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History of the Self: Aging
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 gerontology, which, by the way, was a term that Metchnikoff 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 zeroes in on this one idea, that the body was being poisoned.
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History of the Self: Aging
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.
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History of the Self: Aging
Remember, Metchikov 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.
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History of the Self: Aging
Metchnikoff had to tell everyone. It's 1904, Paris. A crowded lecture hall at the Society of French Agriculturalists. The famous Eli Metchnikoff is the guest speaker.
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History of the Self: Aging
And he starts by getting up there and rattling off some pretty dark ideas.
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History of the Self: Aging
He claimed they were more likely to commit suicide or be murdered.
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History of the Self: Aging
He also repeated, without evidence, by the way, that some cultures killed and ate their women.
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History of the Self: Aging
Metchnikoff 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.
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History of the Self: Aging
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.
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History of the Self: Aging
That one lecture, Luba says, started a global yogurt trend that still exists today.
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History of the Self: Aging
Much later, we'd find out that yogurt was probably not the only reason people in that region of Bulgaria lived so long. But it didn't really matter. Pharmacies 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.
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History of the Self: Aging
Even breakfast cereal pioneer John Harvey Kellogg reached out to Metchnikoff. His face was everywhere.
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History of the Self: Aging
This wasn't exactly what Metchnikoff 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.
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History of the Self: Aging
Metchnikoff 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, Metchnikov 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 time.
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History of the Self: Aging
On a cloudy May morning in 1909, Eli Mechnikov, bowtie and gray coat, and his wife Olga, white blouse, straw hat, descend from an overnight train.
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History of the Self: Aging
Metchnikov has returned to Russia, where he was born, to visit the writer and philosopher Leo Tolstoy.
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History of the Self: Aging
This wasn't just some random meeting. Although the two had never met, their work had been in conversation for years. Tolstoy was critical of Metchnikoff's work and threw shade on science in general.
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History of the Self: Aging
And Metchnikov had written responses about Tolstoy, warning of the dangers of discarding science and embracing just spirituality.
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History of the Self: Aging
Now it's time to talk face to face. Metchnikov had minds. Now he needed hearts. At Tolstoy's estate, Metchnikoff 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.
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History of the Self: Aging
The two spend the day together, debating science versus religion, debating as they ride in a carriage, debating after listening to Piano Works by Chopin, debating over tea,
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History of the Self: Aging
For Metchnikov, science and reasoning always key. For Tolstoy, morals above all.
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History of the Self: Aging
Tolstoy and Menshnikov's dispute of science versus religion fit into this larger European debate at the time over how to view and improve life.
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History of the Self: Aging
For Tolstoy, the answer was no. So morality, love, and faith in the here and now was the most important. But Metchnikov, 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.
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History of the Self: Aging
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.
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History of the Self: Aging
Over 100 people at the Pasteur Institute get recruited to the war effort.
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History of the Self: Aging
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, to live longer and live healthier until they felt ready to go.
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History of the Self: Aging
The idea that humans would willfully create so much death crushed him.
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History of the Self: Aging
This is Jay Oshansky, professor of public health at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He's one of the people today following in Eli Metchnikoff's footsteps.
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History of the Self: Aging
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 Metchnikoff would have turned 150, Jay made a bet.
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History of the Self: Aging
Could science keep someone alive until they're 150 years old?
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History of the Self: Aging
Muscle fibers, brain neurons, parts of our bodies that power on life and degrade as you age.
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History of the Self: Aging
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.
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History of the Self: Aging
The human desire to beat aging began way before Metchnikoff and will likely last way after Jay.
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History of the Self: Aging
Though in some ways, some of us get more than that. Eli Metchnikoff wasn't able to beat aging, but he's still with us. In fridges and on breakfast tables. Everywhere.
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History of the Self: Aging
In the middle of the 19th century, Ilya Ivanovich and his wife and children left St. Petersburg, Russia for the countryside.
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History of the Self: Aging
It was here, on a little slice of land outside the main village, that they would welcome their fifth child into the world.
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History of the Self: Aging
These descriptions of Eli Mechnikoff's early life are from the biography his wife, Olga, wrote about him.
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History of the Self: Aging
This is Lina Zeldovich. She's currently a science and medical journalist in New York City. But she grew up in the former Soviet Union, where Eli Metchnikoff was a household name.
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History of the Self: Aging
She remembers hearing about his famous discoveries the same way you might have learned about Albert Einstein's E equals MC squared.
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History of the Self: Aging
Metchnikoff 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 cholera 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.
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History of the Self: Aging
So Metchnikoff 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.
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History of the Self: Aging
And he dedicated his early career to researching that theory.
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History of the Self: Aging
This is Luba Vukonsky. She's a science writer at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel.
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History of the Self: Aging
This trip to Sicily would change everything for Metchnikoff. He and his wife were staying by the seaside in a cottage overlooking the bright blue Messina Strait. The Strait was home to all sorts of marine creatures. And while his wife went out to explore Sicily, Metchnikoff would spend long days holed up in the cottage, staring at jars filled with seawater and tiny organisms.
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History of the Self: Aging
One day, he had his eye pressed up against his microscope, peering inside these minuscule starfish larvae.
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History of the Self: Aging
These were cells that wandered inside the larvae, gobbling up food and other particles. Meshnikov had seen these cells in action before, but that day, watching them go about their business, it struck him. Music
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History of the Self: Aging
If the cells attacked the thorn as a foreign invader, his theory would be correct.
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History of the Self: Aging
Watching this unfold through his microscope, his mind was blown.
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History of the Self: Aging
The invisible had become visible. Metchnikoff wasn't the first person to observe this healing force, but he was the first person to define it as an immune response. This was the work that would later earn him a Nobel Prize.
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History of the Self: Aging
Around the turn of the century, while Metchnikoff was consumed by his work on immunity, another question started to nag at him.
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History of the Self: Aging
The Pasteur Institute was home to the miracle makers of the day, scientists who were researching vaccination or figuring out what caused plague.
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History of the Self: Aging
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.