Albert Claude

Born in Longlier in 1899, Claude served in British Intelligence during the First World War and was imprisoned twice in concentration camps. The service earned him a spot at the University of Liège to study medicine without the usual prerequisites, and he took his MD in 1928. A year later he landed at the Rockefeller Institute in New York, where he invented cell fractionation in 1930 - a technique that let him isolate and identify the agents of cancer and the organelles that had been invisible until then. He was the first to turn an electron microscope on living tissue, and in 1945 he published the first detailed structure of a cell, revealing the endoplasmic reticulum, Golgi apparatus, and the rest of the interior architecture. He later directed cancer research in Brussels and taught across three universities. In 1974 he shared the Nobel with Christian de Duve and George Palade, the capstone on work that turned cells from mysteries into maps.