Christian de Duve

The son of Belgian refugees, de Duve was born in England in 1917 and returned to Belgium in 1920. Educated by Jesuits, he studied medicine at Louvain, earned his MD in 1941, then pivoted to chemistry, researching insulin and diabetes. After work on penicillin purification and training under Hugo Theorell and Carl and Gerty Cori, he joined Louvain's faculty in 1947. In 1962 he began splitting time between Louvain and Rockefeller University, a dual appointment he held for decades. His serendipitous discoveries of peroxisomes and lysosomes earned him the Nobel Prize in 1974, shared with Albert Claude and George Palade; that same year he founded what became the de Duve Institute in Brussels. He died by legal euthanasia in 2013 after long illness.