Albert Claude (French pronunciation: [albɛʁ klod]; 24 August 1899 – 22 May 1983) was a Belgian-American cell biologist and medical doctor who shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1974 with Christian de Duve and George Emil Palade.

In recognition of his service, he was granted enrolment at the University of Liège in Belgium to study medicine without any formal education required for the course.

His father was a Paris-trained baker and ran a bakery-cum-general store at Longlier valley near railroad station.

Due to economic depression the family moved to Athus, a prosperous region with steel mills, in 1907.

Since he had no formal secondary education, particularly required for medicine course, such as in Greek and Latin, he tried to join School of Mining in Liège.

[4] Claude received travel grants from Belgian government for his doctoral thesis on the transplantation of mouse cancers into rats.

Simon Flexner, then Director, accepted his proposal to work on the isolation and identification of the Rous sarcoma virus.

In 1938 he identified and purified for the first time component of Rous sarcoma virus, the causal agent of carcinoma, as "ribose nucleoprotein" (eventually named RNA).

He also discovered cytoplasmic granules full of RNA and named them "microsomes", which were later renamed ribosomes, the protein synthesizing machineries of cell.

In the mid sixties during an Electron Microscopy symposium in (Bratislava)-(Czechoslovakia) organized by the (UNESCO) at the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, he meets young scientist Dr. Emil Mrena who was at that time head of the Electron Microscopy department.

Claude was known to be a bit of an eccentric and had close friendship with painters, including Diego Rivera and Paul Delvaux, and musicians such as Edgard Varèse.

After his retirement in 1971 from the Université libre de Bruxelles and from the directorship of the Institut Jules Bordet, he continued his research at the University of Louvain with his collaborator Dr. Emil Mrena, who ended up resigning in 1977 due to decreasing activity of the Laboratory, moving to other research works.

It is said that he continued his research in seclusion until he died of natural causes, at his home in Brussels, on Sunday night on 22 May 1983, but he had stopped visiting his own laboratory in Louvain already in 1976 due to his weak health.