2 Hryvni Illia Mechnikov

Illia Mechnikov shared the 1908 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Paul Ehrlich for his discovery of phagocytosis — the process by which certain immune cells engulf and destroy pathogens. He made the foundational observations at Odessa in 1882, watching mobile cells in starfish larvae respond to a splinter he had inserted, and spent much of his subsequent career at the Pasteur Institute in Paris under Louis Pasteur himself. Ukraine has claimed him as a native son; he was born in Kharkiv Oblast in 1845.