|
Albert Claude
(24 Aug 1898 - 22 May 1983)
Belgian-American cytologist
who was awarded the 1974 Nobel Prize for Physiology or
Medicine for discoveries concerning the structural and
functional organization of the cell.
|
“Until 1930 or
thereabout biologists [using microscopes], in the situation of
Astronomers and Astrophysicists, were permitted to see the objects of
their interest, but not to touch them; the cell was as distant from us,
as the stars and galaxies were from them. ”
— Albert Claude
Nobel Lecture, The Coming Age of the Cell,
12 Dec 1974
“I remember
vividly my student days, spending hours at the light microscope,
turning endlessly the micrometric screw, and gazing at the blurred
boundary which concealed the mysterious ground substance where the
secret mechanisms of cell life might be found.”
— Albert Claude
Nobel Lecture, The Coming Age of the Cell,
12 Dec 1974
“In the long course of cell life on
this earth it remained, for our age for
our generation, to receive the full ownership of our inheritance. We
have entered the cell, the Mansion of our birth, and started the
inventory of our acquired wealth.”
— Albert Claude
talking about the new
information revealed by electron microscopy
Nobel Lecture, The Coming Age of the Cell, 12 Dec 1974
Nobel Lecture, The Coming Age of the Cell, 12 Dec 1974
“If we examine the accomplishments of man in his most advanced
endeavors,
in theory and in practice, we find that the cell has done all this long
before him, with greater resourcefulness and much greater efficiency.”
— Albert Claude
Nobel Lecture, The Coming Age of the Cell,
12 Dec 1974
“I told him that for a modern scientist, practicing experimental
research,
the least that could be said, is that we do not know. But I felt that
such a negative answer was only part of the truth. I told him that in
this universe in which we live, unbounded in space, infinite in stored
energy and, who knows, unlimited in time, the adequate and positive
answer, according to my belief, is that this universe may, also,
possess infinite potentialities.”
— Albert Claude
Nobel Lecture, The Coming Age of the Cell,
12 Dec 1974
“Life,
this anti-entropy, ceaselessly reloaded with energy, is a climbing
force, toward order amidst chaos, toward light, among the darkness of
the indefinite, toward the mystic dream of Love, between the fire which
devours itself and the silence of the Cold.”
— Albert Claude
Nobel Lecture, The Coming Age of the Cell,
12 Dec 1974

