Élie Metchnikoff
In 1882, encouraged by Darwin, the zoologist and discoverer of fertilization Hermann Fol along with Jule Barrois of the Université de Lille, established a laboratory in Villefranche in a former Lazert building. They acquired use of buildings previously leased to the Russian Navy as a coal depot in 1884, the Galériens and the Vielle Forge. Barrois and Fol were forced to give up the facility in 1888 at the demand of Alexis Korotneff of the University of Kiev who had frequented the laboratory in previous years and now wanted to establish a Russian research facility: The "Russian Zoological Station" (Mosse 1952) . Russian, French, and American biologists including Hipployte Pergallo, Aleksei Alekseevich Korotnev, Carl Vogt, Hermann Fol, Jules Henri Barrois, Élie Metchnikoff and Louis Agassiz among others worked on the planktonic fauna and embryos collected in the bay. To this day the Bay of Villefranche remains an exceptional natural resource for the study of plankton. Since the 1930s the facility has been administered by the University of Paris.