Albert Claude

Albert Claude married Julia Gilder in 1935 but the couple later divorced. They had a daughter Philippa.

He died a natural death in his home in Brussels in May 22, 1983.

His autobiography suggests he was born on August 24, 1899, while the civil register mentions the year as 1898. He was born in the small village of Longlier in Neufchâteau, Belgium, in the family of Florentin Joseph Claude and Marie-Glaudice Watriquant Claude as their youngest child among one daughter and three sons.

His father had a bakery-cum-general store. He had seen his mother suffer from breast cancer since 1902 during his pre-school life. She died when Albert Claude was seven years old.

He joined ‘Longlier Primary School’ which was a pluralistic school with a single teacher and a single room with students of different grades. He became a bell boy of the church and used to ring the bell of the church every day at 6 am.

As a result of economic depression, the family shifted to Athus In 1907 which was a more flourishing area with steel mills. There he joined a German school but had to drop out after a couple of years to look after his ailing uncle who was suffering from disability due to cerebral haemorrhage. For several years he took care of his uncle and later during the early part of the World War I he worked as apprentice in steel mills.

He was motivated by the zeal of the then British Minister of War, Winston Churchill that saw him volunteering in the ‘British Intelligence Service’ and serving it during the war period. He faced confinement in concentration camps for a couple of times.

The subject of his doctoral thesis was mouse cancer transplant into rats for which he received travel allowance from the government of Belgium. During 1928 to 1929 he stayed in Berlin and was associated with the ‘Institut für Krebsforschung’ and later with the ‘Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Biology’ to conduct his postdoctoral research.

In 1929 the ‘Belgian American Educational Foundation’ awarded him with a fellowship to conduct research in the United States. His application at the ‘Rockefeller Institute’ (at present the ‘Rockefeller University’) in New York to research on the analysis and isolation of Rous sarcoma virus was accepted by the then Director of the institute Simon Flexner. There he joined a group led by James Murphy who was analysing the virus Rous Sarcoma, a tumour agent that mainly infects chicken.

The causal agent of carcinoma which is a component of Rous sarcoma virus was for the first time analysed and purified by Albert Claude as "ribose nucleoprotein" (finally named as ‘RNA’) in 1938.

In 1941 he was given American citizenship.

Electron microscopes that were usually used for physical researches were first applied by him in biological cell study during the study of structure of mitochondria in 1945. According to his discovery, mitochondria are the “power houses’ of all cells.

The path breaking cell fractionation process was discovered by him in 1930. The method included releasing of cell contents by disintegrating the cells and breaking the membranes. After separating out the membranes, he centrifuged the rest of the cell mass to disassociate and segregate the contents in respect of their mass. The cell contents thus centrifuged were then segregated into fractions of specific mass. He then discovered that distinct fractions were responsible for distinct cell functions.