Claude, Albert

Albert Claude, ca. 1930 Courtesy of Philippa Claude Albert Claude (24 August 1899 – 22 May 1983) was a Belgian-American cell biologist and medical doctor who shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1974 with Christian de Duve and George Emil Palade. He joined the Rockefeller cancer laboratory of James B. Murphy in 1929, with the goal of using biochemical methods to isolate the Rous sarcoma virus. At the time, scientists still debated whether this tumor-causing agent, discovered in 1911 at Rockefeller by Peyton Rous, was a virus. In order to isolate the agent, Claude used a mortar and pestle to gently break open infected cells, then he centrifuged the contents to separate sub-cellular components by their density into fractions that could then be analyzed biochemically. He remained at Rockefeller until 1949 when he became director of the Jules Bordet Institute at the University of Brussels. See also Cell Fractionation, Biochemistry, and Electron Microscopy: The Birth of Modern Cell Biology Years at the Rockefeller Institute: 1929-1949https://digitalcommons.rockefeller.edu/scientific-staff/1009/thumbnail.jp