Everything about Christian De Duve totally explained
Christian René de Duve (born
October 2,
1917) is an internationally acclaimed
cytologist and
biochemist. De Duve was born in
Thames-Ditton,
Britain, as a son of
Belgian immigrants. They returned to Belgium in
1920. De Duve was educated by the
Jesuits at Onze-Lieve-Vrouwecollege in
Antwerp, before studying at the
Catholic University of Leuven, where he became a
professor in
1947. He specialized in subcellular
biochemistry and
cell biology and discovered
peroxisomes and
lysosomes,
cell organelles.
Amongst other subjects, de Duve studied the distribution of
enzymes in
rat liver cells using
rate-zonal centrifugation. De Duve's work on
cell fractionation provided an insight into the function of cell structures.
In
1960, De Duve was awarded the
Francqui Prize for Biological and Medical Sciences. He was awarded the shared
Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in
1974, together with
Albert Claude and
George E. Palade, for describing the structure and function of organelles in biological cells. His later years have been mostly devoted to
origin of life studies, which he admits is still a speculative field (see
thioester).
His work has contributed to the emerging consensus that the
endosymbiotic theory is correct; this idea proposes that
mitochondria,
chloroplasts, and perhaps other organelles of
eukaryotic cells originated as
prokaryote endosymbionts, which came to live inside eukaryotic cells.
De Duve proposes that
peroxisomes may have been the first endosymbionts, which allowed cells to withstand the growing amounts of free molecular oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere. Since peroxisomes have no
DNA of their own, this proposal has much less evidence than the similar claims for mitochondria and chloroplasts.
Bibliography
- A Guided Tour of the Living Cell (1984) ISBN 0-7167-5002-3
- Blueprint For a Cell: The Nature and Origin of Life (1991) ISBN 0-89278-410-5
- Vital Dust: Life As a Cosmic Imperative (1996) ISBN 0-465-09045-1
- Life Evolving: Molecules, Mind, and Meaning (2002) ISBN 0-19-515605-6
- Singularities: Landmarks on the Pathways of Life (2005) ISBN 978-0-521-84195-5
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