Albert Kluyver

Albert Jan Kluyver was a Dutch microbiologist and biochemist, born on 3 June 1888 and died on 14 May 1956, and a Foreign Member of the Royal Society. In 1926 he and Hendrick Jean Louis Donker published the classic paper Die Einheit in der Biochemie, which helped establish his view that at a biochemical level all organisms are unified. He expressed the idea in the aphorism that from elephant to butyric acid bacterium it is all the same, and he envisioned comparative biochemistry as the biochemical equivalent of comparative anatomy. He is associated with the Delft school of microbiology, where he succeeded Martinus Beijerinck, and he became a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1926. He won the Copley Medal in 1953, and the yeast genus Kluyveromyces and the bacterial genus Kluyvera are named in his honour.