Marcel Florkin (

Liège Liège ( ; ; ; ; ) is a City status in Belgium, city and Municipalities in Belgium, municipality of Wallonia, and the capital of the Liège Province, province of Liège, Belgium. The city is situated in the valley of the Meuse, in the east o ...

, 15 August 1900 – 3 May 1979) was a Belgian biochemist. Florkin was graduated in 1928 as a Doctor in Medicine and became in 1934 a professor of

biochemistry Biochemistry, or biological chemistry, is the study of chemical processes within and relating to living organisms. A sub-discipline of both chemistry and biology, biochemistry may be divided into three fields: structural biology, enzymology, a ...

at the

University of Liège The University of Liège (), or ULiège, is a major public university of the French Community of Belgium founded in 1817 and based in Liège, Wallonia, Belgium. Its official language is French (language), French. History The university was foun ...

. He retired as professor emeritus in 1970. In 1951, he was the initiator of the Belgian Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. Together with

Christian de Duve Christian René Marie Joseph, Viscount de Duve (2 October 1917 – 4 May 2013) was a Nobel Prize-winning Belgian cytologist and biochemist. He made serendipitous discoveries of two cell organelles, peroxisomes and lysosomes, for which he sh ...

, and others, he wrote a proposal for the statutes which was adopted in 1952, on the first general meeting. In 1944, he published a book (translated to English in 1949) concerning biochemical evolution, in which he explained the relevance of evolution for understanding differences in metabolism and chemical makeup between different types of organisms. In later years he applied the principles of

biosemiotics Biosemiotics (from the Ancient Greek, Greek βίος ''bios'', "life" and σημειωτικός ''sēmeiōtikos'', "observant of signs") is a field of semiotics (especially Neurosemiotics) and biology that studies the prelinguistic meaning-makin ...

(indicator biology) on biochemistry. In 1946, Marcel Florkin was awarded the

Francqui Prize The Francqui Prize is a prestigious Belgian scholarly and scientific prize named after Émile Francqui. Normally annually since 1933, the Francqui Foundation awards it in recognition of the achievements of a scholar or scientist, who at the star ...

on Biological and Medical Sciences. He was a member of the ''Association for the intellectual and artistic progress of Wallonia''.

Bibliography

* Florkin, M, ''Concepts of molecular biosemiotics and of molecular evolution'', In: Comprehensive Biochemistry, 29A: 1–124, 1974. * Florkin, M, ''A History of Biochemistry'', American Elsevier Publishing Co., 1972, xviii + 343 pp.

References

Sources

* Fruton, JS, ''Marcel Florkin, 1900–1979, historian of biochemistry'', Hist Philos Life Sci. 1980;2(1):167-71

External links

Belgian Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
(BMB)] Physicians from Liège University of Liège alumni 1900 births 1979 deaths Academic staff of the University of Liège Walloon movement activists Presidents of the International Union of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology {{Belgium-scientist-stub