Albert Claude (1898-1983), a Belgian-born cell biochemist, shared the 1974 Nobel Prize for physiology (medicine) with Christian Rene de Duve and George Emil Palade for his research on cell structure and function. He was the first to isolate a cancer cell by biochemical techniques, and he discovered that RNA, a nucleic acid, was the major component. He did his most important work (1929-1949) at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (now Rockefeller University) in the United States.