Jules Bordet

BORDET, Jules (born 1870), celebrated Belgian immunologist and bacteriologist, a student of Metchnikoff, director of the Bacteriological Institute in Brussels, and professor at the Free University of Belgium. For his immunological and bacteriological works, he was awarded the international Nobel Prize, as well as the gold medal named after him by the French Academy of Sciences. Bordet was the first to establish the physicochemical nature of serum immunity reactions, demonstrated the mechanism of agglutination, hemolysis, precipitation, detoxification, and others, elucidated the role and unity of alexin in immunity reactions, discovered—together with Gay—the conglutination reaction, and—together with Gengou—the alexin fixation reaction, which served as the prototype for the Wassermann reaction. Bordet also developed his own "adsorption" theory of immunity, provided the impetus through his experiments for the physicochemical elaboration of the doctrine of anaphylaxis, for which he proposed his own interpretation, created a special hypothesis of bacteriophagy, proposed his own theory of blood coagulation, discovered and described, together with Gengou, a special bacterium as the causative agent of whooping cough, improved the method for obtaining cultures of... Traité de l'immunité dans les maladies infectieuses, published in 1920 and which has now become a bibliographic rarity. Bordet's work Immunity, Antigens, and Antibodies was translated into Russian (Moscow, 1928).