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.

The conquest of science: women and science in Russia, 1860-1940.

This essay describes the growing number of women in science in Russia from 1860 to 1940, analyzing the development of a significant community in terms of three generations. These generations are defined by the removal of various obstacles to women's participation in the sciences. The decisive transitions took place with the creation of higher education for women in the 1870s and the establishment of formal gender equality by the Bolshevik regime after 1917.

[The experiments with laboratory animals from a bioethical point of view--history, modern time, perspectives].

The origin of laboratory animal science was called forth by violent development of experimental biology and medicine in the XIX century on the one hand, and on the other hand by the necessity to have standard healthy animals for experiments with strictly definite biological characteristics. With this aim in view management technology and animal use in experiments have been constantly improved. "Laboratory animal" notion has been formed by the end of the XIX century.

Socio-economic and scientific premises for forming the strategies against malaria in Russia under Soviet power.

The rapid spread of malaria in the 1920s-early '30s in the USSR was a result of Stalin's social and demographic policy. The Soviet government needed to elaborate the special complex of organisational and applied scientific measures concerning the eradication of malaria. The Central Malaria Commission and a network of antimalaria stations were created.