Albert Claude was born in Belgium in 1898. A cell biochemist he emigrated to the United States where he worked for the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (1929-49). In 1974 Claude won the Nobel Prize for his research on cell structure and function. Claude was the first to isolate a cancer virus by biochemical technique, and he discovered that RNA, a nucleic acid, was the major component. Albert Claude died in 1983.