14 
GRAND DISCOVERIES OF LIFE 
span human life itself is greatly prolonged. By cooking his food 
man unwittingly destroys these pathologic germs which always 
before severely fixed his destiny, curtailed his natural life and 
engendered most of the ills to which his body was heir. Oh, that 
we today might erect a fitting momument to that unnamed genius 
who first discovered fire, but whose entity is now so long lost in the 
gulf of time. By proper cooking of his food and proper care of 
all his organs it was the great Mitchnikoff’s contention that the 
normal life span of man is not less than 150 years. 
At any rate, by cooking his food and thereby removing an 
unseen, insidious and deadly enemy man is the first animal since 
original creation, 500,000,000 years ago, to lift itself out of its 
environment so severely limited by nature, eradicate disease, and 
by the independence thus gained to defer his old age and increase 
greatly all the days of his life. It is a discovery of vast possibili¬ 
ties. It is surely one of the great discoveries of life, one of the 
crises which is bound to have untold effect on the whole future 
course of organic evolution. It is probably the direct means by 
which all other forms of life will at no distant day succumb 
to man. Then will he be the sole survival of the fittest simply be¬ 
cause he chanced to survive. 
Man thus becomes the first animal in its own life-time to add 
to his natural acquirements of knowledge all the experiences of 
his ancestors, a strange and infinitely progressive phenomenon 
which lately Korzybski expresses belief to be the essential nature 
of man. 
