Albert Claude
Albert Claude
Albert Claudewas a Belgian medical doctor and cell biologist who shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1974 with Christian de Duve and George Emil Palade. His elementary education started in a comprehensive primary school at Longlier, his birthplace. He served in the British Intelligence Service during the First World War, and got imprisoned in concentration camps twice. In recognition of his service, he was granted enrolment at the University of Liège in Belgium to study medicine without...
NationalityBelgian
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth24 August 1899
CountryBelgium
This attempt to isolate cell constituents might have been a failure if they had been destroyed by the relative brutality of the technique employed. But this did not happen.
Looking back 25 years later, what I may say is that the facts have been far better than the dreams. In the long course of cell life on this earth it remained, for our age for our generation, to receive the full ownership of our inheritance.
I remember vividly my student days, spending hours at the light microscope, turning endlessly the micrometric screw, and gazing at the blurred boundary which concealed the mysterious ground substance where the secret mechanisms of cell life might be found.
Until 1930 or thereabout biologists [using microscopes], in the situation of Astronomers and Astrophysicists, were permitted to see the objects of their interest, but not to touch them; the cell was as distant from us, as the stars and galaxies were from them.
Is it absurd to imagine that our social behavior, from amoeba to man, is also planned and dictated, from stored Information, by the cells? And that the time has come for men to be entrusted with the task, through heroic efforts, of bringing life to other worlds?
It is the cells which create and maintain in us, during the span of our lives, our will to live and survive, to search and experiment, and to struggle.
Man, like other organisms, is so perfectly coordinated that he may easily forget, whether awake or asleep, that he is a colony of cells in action, and that it is the cells which achieve, through him, what he has the illusion of accomplishing himself.
If we examine the accomplishments of man in his most advanced endeavors, in theory and in practice, we find that the cell has done all this long before him, with greater resourcefulness and much greater efficiency.
The cell, over the billions of years of her life, has covered the earth many times with her substance, found ways to control herself and her environment, and insure her survival.
For over two billion years, through the apparent fancy of her endless differentiations and metamorphosis the Cell, as regards its basic physiological mechanisms, has remained one and the same. It is life itself, and our true and distant ancestor.
We know that the cell has possessed these attributes and biological devices and has continued to use them for billions of cell generations and years.
But, in the name of the experimental method and out of our poor knowledge, are we really entitled to claim that everything happens by chance, to the exclusion of all other possibilities?
Man has now become an adjunct to perfect and carry forward these conquests.
We have entered the cell, the Mansion of our birth, and started the inventory of our acquired wealth.