Christian de Duve

Christian de Duve ( Christian René de Duve, born October 2, 1917 in Thames Ditton, United Kingdom, † May 4, 2013 in Nethen ) was a Belgian biochemist and Nobel laureate.

Life and work

Christian de Duve comes from a Belgian noble family. His parents had fled during the First World War and returned to England in 1920 with his back to Antwerp. In 1941 he received his medical degree in Leuven from the doctorate.

After studying in Stockholm and Washington 1951, he was professor at Louvain. He discovered two new cell components: the lysosomes, vesicles, which are hydrolytic enzymes that are defective or have become obsolete cell organelles or degrade recorded outside the cell in food vacuoles substances, and the peroxisomes, which also have a detoxification function.

In 1960 he received the Francqui Price, a renowned Belgian Science Award, for his work in biochemistry.

In 1962 he became a professor at the Rockefeller Institute in New York, where Albert Claude, the first electron microscopic studies conducted in the 1940s to cells and where George Emil Palade worked.

Since 1973 he was a member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina.

In 1974 he was awarded, along with Claude and Palade, received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his research on the structure and function of the cell. In the same year he founded the International Institute for Cell and Molecular Pathology (ICP ) in Brussels, in which line he was involved up to his death. In 1989 he received the EB Wilson Medal and the 1967 Canada Gairdner International Award.

On May 4, 2013, made ​​by the legalized euthanasia in Belgium use.

Publications

  • A guided tour of the living cell. Scientific American Books, New York, 1984, ISBN 0-7167-5002-3. The cell. Expedition into the basic structure of life. Spektrum der Wissenschaft, Heidelberg, 1986, ISBN 3-922508-79-0.
  • Origin of life. Prebiotic evolution and the origin of the cell. Spektrum Akademischer Verlag, Heidelberg / Berlin / Oxford 1994, ISBN 3-86025-187-2.
  • Born of dust. Life as a cosmic inevitability. Spektrum Akademischer Verlag, Heidelberg / Berlin / Oxford 1995, ISBN 3-86025-352-2; Rowohlt, Reinbek 1997, ISBN 3-499-60160-5.
  • The Genetics of original sin. The effect of natural selection on the future of mankind. Spektrum Akademischer Verlag, Heidelberg 2011, ISBN 978-3-8274-2708-3.
Hydrolysis Francqui Prize Gairdner Foundation International Award Integrated Authority File
185924
de