Cell Structure
Year of Discovery: 1933
What Is It? The first accurate map of the many internal structures that make up
a living cell.
Who Discovered It? Albert Claude
Why Is This One of the 100 Greatest?
Albert Claude was the first scientist to develop procedures for isolating and studying
individual structures within a cell. He is the one who mapped the inner organization and activity of a cell and its many components. He is rightly called the founder of modern cell
biology.
Although he never graduated from high school, Claude pioneered the use of centrifuge
techniques and the electron microscope for the study of living cells. He discovered a dozen
key components of cells, identified the function of other cell substructures, and laid the
groundwork for a whole new field of cellular biology.
How Was It Discovered?
Albert Claude received only a third-grade education before he was forced to quit
school and get a mill job. After serving in the Belgian army during World War I, Claude was
able to study medicine in college when the Belgian government allowed any returning soldier to attend college—even though the University of Liege was less than eager to accept an
illiterate country soldier.
During his studies, Claude submitted a lengthy research proposal to the Rockefeller
Institute for Medical Research in New York. It was accepted and Claude immigrated to
America.
Claude proposed to study live cancer cells and discover how the disease was transmitted. His proposal called for him to separate cells into different components for individual
study, something that had never been tried before. There were no established procedures or
equipment for such an operation. Claude had to scrounge crude equipment from machine
and butcher shops. He used commercial meat grinders to pulverize samples of chicken cancerous tumors that he suspended in a liquid medium. He used a high-speed centrifuge to
separate the ground-up cells into their various subparts—heaviest on the bottom, lightest on
top. He called the procedure cell fractionation.
He now had test tubes filled with layers of goo and mud. Since no one had ever separated cell subparts before, it took Claude several years of study and practice to determine
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