THE NOBEL FOUNDATIONThe Belgian biochemist Christian de Duve died at home on Saturday (May 4) of euthanasia. He won the 1974 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering lysosomes, organelles that digest cellular waste.
The 95-year-old scientist spent the final weeks of his life writing to friends explaining his decision to be euthanized, according to The New York Times. Euthanasia has been legal in Belgium since 2002. Günter Blobel, a colleague at The Rockefeller University in New York, told the newspaper that the biochemist had “a number of health problems,” including cancer, and that he had suffered a recent fall.
According to his autobiography on Nobelprize.org, de Duve was born in 1917 in England, where his parents had gone to escape World War I, but he spent much of his childhood in Antwerp, Belgium. Though he loved literature and the humanities, de Duve decided to train in medicine and received his MD in 1941. He served as a medic ...
