Duve, Christian René de (1917- )

English-born Belgian biochemist who was awarded a Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1974 with Albert Claude and George Palade for their work in determining the structural and functional organization of the cell, and in particular the structure and function of lysosomes (cell organelles containing enzymes that can break down the cell).

He worked with Palade using Palade's technique, differential centrifugation, to examine the function of individual inner parts of secretory cells, specifically the role of individual cell organelles in the manufacture of enzymes secreted by the cell. In these studies, de Duve discovered small, membrane-bound organelles, called lysosomes, that contain many enzymes capable of breaking down redundant structures inside and outside the cell to make way for more useful ones. Lysosomes, therefore, play an important part in cell and tissue remodelling, such as that which occurs in the nervous system and in embryonic development.

De Duve was born in Thames-Ditton in Surrey but moved to study medicine at Louvain, Belgium, in 1947, where he was appointed professor of biochemistry in 1951. He later moved to New York to take up the chair of biochemistry at the Rockefeller University in 1962. He is professor emeritus at Louvain and Rockefeller.