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Christian René de Duve è nato il 2 ottobre del 1917 a Thames Ditton, circa 30 Km a sud ovest di Londra ed è stato un biochimico di chiara fama premiato con il Nobel per la medicina nel 1974.
I suoi genitori erano originari di Nethen una cittadina vicino Bruxelles dove tornarono a vivere subito dopo la guerra quando Christian aveva solo tre anni, così che la laurea in biologia molecolare la prese nella vicina Università Cattolica di Lovanio.
Tra le molte sue scoperte ricordiamo quelle del glucagone, dei lisosomi e dei perossisomi.
La sua opera "Polvere Vitale" pubblicata in Italia nel 1998 racchiude i 4 miliardi di sviluppo della vita sulla terra (dalle biomolecole alla mente umana) non è la sola che avuto una larga eco internazionale.
Fondo l'Istituto di Patologia Cellulare che oggi porta il suo nome.
Durante i rari momenti di relax si dilettava con il bridge.
Morì il 4 maggio del 2013 nella sua casa di Nethen mediante eutanasia.
Christian René, viscount de Duve (2 October 1917 – 4 May
2013) was a Nobel Prize-winning Belgian cytologist and biochemist. He was born
in Thames Ditton, Surrey, Great Britain, as a son of Belgian refugees during the
First World War. They returned to Belgium in 1920. He was the Founding President
of the prestigious L'Oréal-UNESCO Awards for Women in Science. He made
serendipitous discoveries of two eukaryotic organelles, peroxisome and lysosome,
for which he shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1974 with
Albert Claude and George E. Palade. He was a multilingual, able to speak
English, French, German, and Flemish, and the skill which once saved his life.
De Duve was born of a shopkeeper Alphonse de Duve and wife Madeleine Pungs in the village of Thames Ditton, near London. His parents fled Belgium at the outbreak of the First World War. After the war in 1920, at age three, he and his family returned to Belgium. He was a precocious boy, always the best student (primus perpetuus as he recalled) in school, except for one year when he was pronounced "out of competition" to give chance to other students. He was educated by the Jesuits at Onze-Lieve-Vrouwecollege in Antwerp, before studying at the Catholic University of Leuven in 1934. He obtained his MDin 1941 from Leuven. He wanted to specialize in endocrinology and joined the laboratory of the Belgian physiologist J. P. Bouckaert. During his last year at medical school in 1940, the Germans invaded Belgium. He was drafted to the Belgian army, and posted in southern France as medical officer. There he was almost immediately taken as prisoner of war by Germans. But fortunate of his ability to speak fluent German and Flemish, he outwitted his captors and escaped back to Belgium. He immediately continued his research. However laboratory supplies were in shortage, he threfore enrolled in a programme to earn a degree in chemistry at the Cancer Institute. His primary research was on insulin and its role in glucose metabolism. He made an initial discovery that a commercial preparation of insulin was contaminated with another pancreatic hormone, the insulin antagonist glucagon. To enhance his skill, he trained atHugo Theorell's laboratory at the Nobel Medical Institute in Stockholm; and then at Carl and Gerti Cori's laboratory at Washington University in St. Louis (all three scientists later won Nobel Prizes). His book on the mechanics of insulin earned him the most advanced degree at the university level agrégation de l'enseignement supérieur (an equivalent of a doctorate) in 1945 and subsequently obtained MSc in chemistry in 1946 at Leuven. His thesis resulted in a book titled Glucose, Insulin and Diabetes, with a number of scientific publications.
De Duve was brought up as a Roman Catholic. However his later years indicated inclination towards agnosticism, if not strict atheism. He was opposed to the notion of a creator. "It would be an exaggeration to say I'm not afraid of death," he explicitly said to a Belgian newspaper Le Soir just a month before his death, "but I'm not afraid of what comes after, because I'm not a believer." He strongly supported biological evolution as a fact, and dismissive of creation science and intelligent design, as explicitly stated in his last book, Genetics of Original Sin: The Impact of Natural Selection on the Future of Humanity. He was among the seventy-eight Nobel laureates in science to endorse the effort to repeal Louisiana Science Education Act of 2008. He married Janine Herman on 30 September 1943. Together they had had two sons, Thierry and Alain, and two daughters, Anne and Françoise. Janine died in 2008, aged 86.
De Duve won Francqui Prize for Biological and Medical Sciences in 1960, and Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1974. King Baudouin of Belgium honoured him to Viscount in 1989. He was the recipient of the Canada Gairdner International Award in 1967, and the Dr. H. P. Heineken Prize in 1973 from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was elected a foreign associate of the US National Academy of Sciences in 1975, and won the E. B. Wilson Award from the American Society for Cell Biology in 1989. He was also a member of the Royal Academies of Medicine and the Royal Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Literature of Belgium; the Pontifical Academy of Sciences of the Vatican; the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; the Academy of Sciences of Paris; the Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina; and the Royal Society of London. In addition, he received honorary doctorates from eighteen universities around the world.
During the rare moments of relaxation was delighted with the bridge.
De Duve died on 4 May 2013, at his home in Nethen, Belgium, at the age of 95. He decided to end his life by legal euthanasia, performed by two doctors before his four children. He had been long suffering from cancer and atrial fibrillation, and his health problems were exacerbated by a recent fall in his home.
