Taming the primitive: Elie Metchnikov and his discovery of immune cells

This essay argues that the idea of race had a profound, yet unacknowledged, impact on Elie Metchnikov's research on immunity. Making the phagocytes, the most primitive cells of the body, responsible for the organism's integrity, Metchnikov attempted to reconcile the cultural idea of primitivity as a threat with the notion of the body as capable of self-defense and self-organization. The vision of phagocytes as being both the agents of an organism's "harmony" and its potential enemies reflected the complications that the ideas of race and racial primitivity met in Russian intellectual contexts.