The art of medicine Metchnikoff and the microbiome

摘要

Walt Whitman first published Leaves of Grass in 1855, but waited until the 1881 edition to name its longest poem "Song of Myself". The following year, across the Atlantic, Russian embryologist Elie Metchnikoff was placing thorns in starfish larvae, noting amoeboid cellular entities that seemed to engulf the thorns. Metchnikoff termed such cells "phagocytes", giving rise to the field of cellular immunology, for which he would receive the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1908. For Metchnikoff, however, phagocytes did not just defend the organism; they were involved in the complex, lifelong process of defining organismic identity in the first place. Selfhood, and the boundaries of the organism, were ever-evolving processes.