Christian René Marie Joseph, Viscount de Duve (2 October 1917 – 4 May 2013) was a Nobel Prize-winning Belgian cytologist and biochemist. He made serendipitous discoveries of two cell organelles, peroxisome and lysosome, for which he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1974 with Albert Claude and George E. Palade (“for their discoveries concerning the structural and functional organization of the cell”). In addition to peroxisome and lysosome, he invented scientific names such as autophagy, endocytosis, and exocytosis in a single occasion.
Christian René Marie Joseph, Viscount de Duve (2 October 1917 – 4 May 2013) was a Nobel Prize-winning Belgian cytologist and biochemist. He made serendipitous discoveries of two cell organelles, peroxisome and lysosome, for which he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1974 bearing in mind Albert Claude and George E. Palade (“for their discoveries concerning the structural and committed organization of the cell”). In adjunct to peroxisome and lysosome, he invented scientific names such as autophagy, endocytosis, and exocytosis in a single occasion.
The son of Belgian refugees during the First World War, de Duve was born in Thames Ditton, Surrey, England. His associates returned to Belgium in 1920. He was educated by the Jesuits at Onze-Lieve-Vrouwinstituut in Antwerp, and studied medicine at the Catholic University of Leuven. Upon earning his MD in 1941, he allied research in chemistry, working on insulin and its role in diabetes mellitus. His thesis earned him the highest the academy degree agrégation de l’enseignement supérieur (equivalent to PhD) in 1945.
With his work upon the purification of penicillin, he obtained an MSc degree in 1946. He went for extra training under (later Nobel Prize winners) Hugo Theorell at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, and Carl and Gerti Cori at the Washington University in St. Louis. He united the capability of medicine at Leuven in 1947. In 1960 he was invited to the Rockfeller Institute (now Rockefeller University). With mutual arrangement subsequently Leuven, he became professor in both universities from 1962, dividing his period between Leuven and New York. He became emeritus professor of the University of Louvain in 1985, and of Rockefeller in 1988.
De Duve was decided the rank of Viscount in 1989 by King Baudouin of Belgium. He was moreover a recipient of Francqui Prize, Gairdner Foundation International Award, Heineken Prize, and E. B. Wilson Medal. In 1974 he founded the International Institute of Cellular and Molecular Pathology in Brussels, eventually renamed the de Duve Institute in 2005. He was the founding President of the L’Oréal-UNESCO Awards for Women in Science. He died by genuine euthanasia after long pain from cancer and atrial fibrillation.