Elie Metchnikoff (1845-1916), winner of the Nobel Prize in 1907 for his contributions to immunology, was first a comparative zoologist, who, working in the wake of Darwin's On the Origin of Species, made seminal contributions to evolutionary biology. His work in comparative embryology is best known in regard to the debates with Ernst Haeckel concerning animal genealogical relationships and the theoretical origins of metazoans. But independent of those polemics, Metchnikoff developed his phagocytosis theory' of immunity as a result of his early comparative embryology...

Professor Metchnikoff expounds his main thesis that human life is not only unnaturally short but unnaturally burdened with physical and mental disabilities. He analyzes the causes of these disharmonies and explains his reasons for hoping that they may be counteracted by a rational hygiene.Elie Metchnikoff (1845-1916) was Sub-Director of the Pasteur Institute, and a Nobel Prize winner for medicine. Metchnikoff was born in Russia and lived in Paris from 1888, where many of his works were originally published in French. He worked in the fields of embryology, comparative anatomy, pathology,...