The Man Who Drank Cholera and Launched the Yogurt Craze

When Ilya Metchnikoff was 8 and running around on his parents’ Panassovka estate in Little Russia, now Ukraine, he was making notes on the local flora like a junior botanist. He gave science lectures to his older brothers and local kids whose attendance he assured by paying them from his pocket money. Metchnikoff earned the nickname “Quicksilver” because he was in constant motion, always wanting to see, taste, and try everything, from studying how his father played card games to learning to sew and embroider with the maids. His wife later wrote in The Life of Ellie Metchnikoff that Metchnikoff asked the “queerest” questions, often exasperating his caretakers. “He could only be kept quiet when his curiosity was awakened by observation of some natural objects such as an insect or a butterfly.”

At 16, Metchnikoff borrowed a microscope from a university professor to study the lower organisms. Darwin’s On the Origin of Species shaped his comparative approach to science during his university years—he viewed all organisms, and physiological processes that took place in them, as interconnected and related.

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