Luba Vukonsky
Appearances
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History of the Self: Aging
And he was appalled to discover how little was known about aging and that there was no systematic study of aging. They were textbooks about diseases of old age, but not about old age itself.
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History of the Self: Aging
His hope was that if people live long enough, they will develop this death instinct.
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History of the Self: Aging
The French morning newspaper Le Matin carried a huge headline article in large block letters all across the front page. And it said, vive la vie, long live life.
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History of the Self: Aging
Death instinct would mean that people would be happy to die after living long and healthy lives.
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History of the Self: Aging
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 they wanted to die.
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History of the Self: Aging
And most of them were poor because, you know, obviously a more wealthy elderly wouldn't make it there.
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History of the Self: Aging
It probably must have been 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.
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History of the Self: Aging
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.
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History of the Self: Aging
He developed a whole philosophy that there was this big disharmony in the world, in nature, between the shortness of human life and people's desire to live.
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History of the Self: Aging
This became for him like his new mission to free the world from this terrible affliction.
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History of the Self: Aging
Meshinkov was very happy that he was still interested in females.
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History of the Self: Aging
When he rode on... In public transportation, he would tell people how they should be careful about microbes. He boiled everything he ate, even strawberries and even peeled bananas. He thought that the skin probably didn't protect them well enough. And when he invited guests to restaurants, he asked to bring a burner and he sterilized the utensils.
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History of the Self: Aging
He thought that the root of aging, that it all started in the intestines.
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History of the Self: Aging
So Mashinkov 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.
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History of the Self: Aging
He learned that in Bulgaria, there is this entire population of centenarians in the mountains.
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History of the Self: Aging
Because they're useless. And he said that people there say that old 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.
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History of the Self: Aging
He was very famous. He was one of the most famous scientists in the world.
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History of the Self: Aging
He brought an old dog and a parrot. The dog was 17 and he looked very old and undecorated. And the parrot, who was 70... looked much younger than the dog.
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History of the Self: Aging
Birds do not have such large intestines as mammals. They don't store as many microbes.
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History of the Self: Aging
And then he says, maybe there's a solution because, you know, in Bulgaria, people live that long.
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History of the Self: Aging
He 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 cause the rotting. And there you have proof. All over the world, you know, newspapers started running stories.
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History of the Self: Aging
I think it's rare to trace the beginning of an industry to a single event. But in this case, I can pretty much say that the yogurt industry started with that lecture.
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History of the Self: Aging
There were ads, this cafe on one of the Parisian boulevards advertised Bulgarian curdled milk. The yogurt craze kind of, you know, grew and grew. I saw pictures of Danone, which I think in the States is called Danone.
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History of the Self: Aging
They sold cups of yogurt and it said, recommended by Professor Metchnikoff 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.
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History of the Self: Aging
He tried sort of to present the facts and to separate it from the hype, but it was just way too late. The 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.
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History of the Self: Aging
He loved the journalists. He never turned them away. And they loved him even more than he loved them. And they followed him around and they took down his every word.
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History of the Self: Aging
So he was looking to sort of to solve the riddle of aging on all levels. He was looking for partners in this quest.
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History of the Self: Aging
He admired so much Tolstoy's writing about the fear of death, which are really masterful.
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History of the Self: Aging
So he thought that Tolstoy must know some secret that I don't.
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History of the Self: Aging
He thought that a solution to everything was science. So, of course, science was going to solve aging as well.
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History of the Self: Aging
The reporter called it a meeting of two monarchs of universal literature and science.
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History of the Self: Aging
So the only thing on which they agreed was yogurt, because Tolstoy turned out to love yogurt. But other than that, it was pretty much a disaster, the meeting. Mitrikov very candidly, very honestly wrote about this himself afterwards.
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History of the Self: Aging
Meshikov was much more spiritual than Tolstoy gave him credit for. He did try, I think, understand human psychology. And I think he thought that somehow together with Tolstoy, 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.
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History of the Self: Aging
And of course, it just, you know, totally crashed. You know, the meeting didn't work at all.
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History of the Self: Aging
At the turn of the 20th century, this was a very dominant dichotomy between pessimism and optimism. Sort of your belief, you know, about the world, you know, is the world getting better?
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History of the Self: Aging
In some of the Russian newspapers, he was bragging about how good he felt about He was saying that this is working. Look, you know, I'm eating yogurt three times a day. I believe, you know, it's doing me a lot of good. And look how vigorous I am.
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History of the Self: Aging
What really killed him was World War I. He was such a believer in rational thought and science. He thought that there will be no more wars, that the world had learned from that. And he was devastated when war broke out and all signs stopped at the Pasteur Institute.
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History of the Self: Aging
His wife describes it like how overnight he turned into an old man.
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History of the Self: Aging
In 1916, so this was already what, like more than a year after the war started, his health 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.
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History of the Self: Aging
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, until the end of his life.
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History of the Self: Aging
Entire sacks of letters that piled up in the mailroom was stuffed with letters from people who didn't want to die.
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History of the Self: Aging
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 believe that Because even despite all the skepticism, I think people wanted to believe that maybe it's true, maybe he has found a recipe, a cure.
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History of the Self: Aging
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.
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History of the Self: Aging
When he was in his late 30s, he traveled to Italy, to the island of Sicily, to study marine animals. And he was studying the larva of starfish.
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History of the Self: Aging
And I've written a book called Immunity, How Ilya Mechnikov Changed the Course of Modern Medicine.
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History of the Self: Aging
He came up with the idea that maybe this is a defensive force of the organism.
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History of the Self: Aging
He performed an experiment. It's a very famous experiment in immunology where he inserted thorns into these larvae.
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History of the Self: Aging
And he saw that the cells indeed ganged up on the thorns. This was for him evidence of his theory that they were there to protect the larva.
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History of the Self: Aging
In fact, this was the first material evidence of inner healing forces in science.
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History of the Self: Aging
The idea that the body has inner powers that can be studied and enhanced and understood, I mean, that's enormous. It just turned everything around.
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History of the Self: Aging
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.