Albert Claude: Mapping the Smallest Bit of Life
“Actually, this school was just a single room with high windows, and a central stove, fed with coal and wood, by the teacher himself. As I remember, there was a set of 5 benches at either side of the stove, with a common sitting board which could accommodate 5 children, in all 50 seats, for an average population, from year to year, of 40 pupils, at the most.
The sexes and grades were mixed, and the ages, from 6 to 11 years old. All the courses were taught at the same time, in the same room, by the same and unique teacher. Under this highly pluralistic system, the school was running smoothly, and the results, as remembered over the years, turned out to be, in every respect, excellent.”
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These words, describing his school, comes from Albert Claude, born on 24th August 1899 in Longlier, a hamlet in Belgium (now Luxembourg) with barely eight hundred people, the man who revealed the entire structure of the cell, the unit of life and won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1974 for it. This was the man who could hardly attend that unique school he talks about as he had to nurse first his mother stricken with breast cancer in 1906, when he was seven years old and then, after another six years, take full care of his uncle suffering from cerebral haemorrhage.
Albert Claude was the youngest among three brothers and one sister. His father, Florentin Joseph, was a Paris-trained baker and ran a bakery-cum-general store at Longlier valley near railroad station. His business suffered a devastating blow from the pre-war depression. The family was hounded by poverty and had to move around from town to town in search of a livelihood, giving Albert no chance of a formal schooling.
After receiving the Nobel Prize with his student George Palade and friend Christian de Duve “for their discoveries concerning the structural and functional organization of the cell”, he progressively developed indifferent health and gradually stopped working in the laboratory from 1976 though he carried out scientific studies at home till his death on 22nd May 1983.
Yet, as he said, “The tragedy I experienced with the long, tormented agony and death of my mother might have influenced me in wanting to study medicine. It was not the case. As far as I remember, even younger than eight, I have always been guided by reason. Not cold reason, but that which leads to the truth, to the real, and to sane Justice. When I went to the University, the medical school was the only place where one could hope to find the means to study life, its nature, its origins, and its ills.”
In Athus, a prosperous German-speaking town, Albert got employment as an apprentice and then an industrial designer in a steel mill. It was the beginning of the First World War. Young Albert was inspired by Churchill and joined the British Intelligence Service as a part of the resistance. He served through the War with exemplary courage for which he was decorated with an Interallied Medal along with veteran status after the War. However, what these recognitions brought along was infinitely more important, both for his own career and for the history of physiology. He was admitted to the University of Liège under a special status and there he completed his MD in 1928.
His personal experience with cancer made him focused on understanding the nature of this killer. During his MD, Claude studied how cancerous cells from mice can be transplanted into rats. In 1928-29 he carried out his postdoctoral research, first at the Institut für Krebsforschung in Berlin, and then at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Biology, Dahlem, in the laboratory of tissues culture of Prof. Albert Fischer. Finally, he moved to Rockefeller Institute (now University) in New York. He was working on Rous sarcoma virus, the virus causing a type of soft tissue cancer in chicken first detected in 1911 by Peyton Rous at Rockefeller Institute.
While working on the cells infected with viruses in an attempt to isolate the virus, Claude made the breakthrough discovery of cell fractionation, breaking up the cells by grinding up the membrane and releasing the contents. He then used a centrifuge, a machine rotating at very high speed. This rotation causes an ‘away-from-centre’ or centrifugal force on anything placed on the rotating platform, pushing it away from the centre of rotation and this push increases with mass of the body.
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So, a mixture of materials with different masses will have the component with largest mass pushed farthest away and so on, providing the most popular and standard way of component separation globally used now. Albert Claude, it should be remembered, had to construct his own centrifuge from meat grinders and sieves. Nevertheless, he managed to separate all the major components of the cell as a series of mass fractions.
However, what is more important is that he could assign different bio-functionalities to each of these mass fractions. In 1938, he identified and purified the causal agent of Rous sarcoma and called it ‘ribose nucleoprotein’, now known as ribonucleic acid or RNA. His next landmark technical innovation was to use electron microscopy, hitherto used for studying arrangements of atoms and molecules in crystals, in imaging cell components. This led to the 1945 understanding of the structure of mitochondria, which he showed to be the powerhouse of the cell.
He also found granules inside the cell that were full of RNA. He called them ‘microsomes’, now called ribosomes. These constitute the protein synthesizing machineries of the cell. With his associate, Keith Porter, he found a ‘lace work’ or ‘fishnet’ like structure in all eukaryotic cells, the cells of all multicellular organisms including us. This is the endoplasmic reticulum, the essential part of the transportation system of the cell. In course of his research, he discovered the other organelles – the Golgi apparatus, chloroplast and lysosome. In 1945 he crystallised all his results into the first published detailed structure of cell. His collective works established the complex functional and structural properties of cells.
He became the Director of Jules Bordet Institute for Cancer Research and Treatment as well as the Professor at the Faculty of Medicine of the Free University of Brussels in 1949 and became an Emeritus Professor of this university in 1971. In 1972 he simultaneously became Professor at University of Louvain and Rockefeller University, and Director of Laboratoire de Biologie Cellulaire et Cancérologie at Louvain-la-Neuve.
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After receiving the Nobel Prize with his student George Palade and friend Christian de Duve “for their discoveries concerning the structural and functional organization of the cell”, he progressively developed indifferent health and gradually stopped working in the laboratory from 1976 though he carried out scientific studies at home till his death on 22nd May 1983.
His prose has a touch of musicality and even a painter’s perspective when he describes his birthplace. “The blue-green colour of the pines, which blends with the blue-grey colour of the massif of slate rocks emerging through a meagre soil gives the countryside an aspect, severe, but also of serene beauty, and even more, when the pure coat of the snow covers it during the long and cold winters.” It is not therefore surprising that, besides his close colleagues, his friends were musicians such as Edgard Varèse, to whom “musical space as open rather than bounded”, and painters such as Diego Rivera, the Mexican revolutionary muralist and the elusive surrealist Paul Delvaux.
Albert Claude died a lonely man of ‘natural causes’ and we have no way to know of the exact cause of his demise. His wife Julia divorced him when they were at Rockefeller University. His only daughter Philippa became a neuroscientist and married her colleague, Antony Stretton, and did not really keep in touch. Perhaps the calmness and fortitude shown by his mother Marie-Glaudice Watriquant in the face of ever-increasing pain and death gave him strength in his last days.
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Alokmay Datta was a Senior Professor at Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics, then a Raja Ramanna Fellow at the Central Glass and Ceramic Research Institute and finally an Emeritus Scientist at Department of Physics, Calcutta University. However, his interests lie beyond Physics or even beyond Science.
