I think, probably the... the most unusual thing about me is my family background. And so, if you don't mind, I'll just start with that, and the story actually starts..., well, it starts, of course, with the... the first cell, but that's the near… the story starts not far from Brussels, exactly on June 18, 1815 on the fields near a little village in the outskirts of Brussels, called Waterloo. And... June 18, 1815 is the day Napoleon was defeated by the Coalition. And on the battlefield there were many wounded, and amongst the wounded was a young Hanoverian officer who came from a family that, at some time in the 17th century, was rather well known in Hanover... if you go there you will still see a street, a chapel, a fountain, biscuits, even a house, which was destroyed by Allied bombing during the last war, but still exists as a replica in the... in the town hall. Anyway, this young man's name was Herman Timoléon von Duve. He was wounded and sent to Antwerp, he was evacuated to a hospital in Antwerp where he was taken care of by a physician named Jean-Baptiste Sassenus. The Sassenus family came from the city of Leuven, Louvain, Louvain and it had Latinised its name was really Van Zassen. Between the Renaissance they had changed the name to Sassenus and that family was associated with the University of Louvain ever since its foundation in 1415. And first, as a printers, the first Jean-Baptiste Sassenus was actually the first printer of the university and since then the family remained associated with the university, and there was even a man called André Dominique Sassenus who died in 1756, if I remember rightly, and who was actually Professor of Biological Chemistry, in the Medical Faculty. And so the physician who took care of my great-grandfather, Herman Timoléon was the great-grandson of this André Dominique Sassenus. Well, it turns out that Herman Timoléon von Duve married the daughter of Jean-Baptiste Sassenus and settled in Antwerp, which his family in Hanover resented very much. But anyway, he became integrated in Antwerp's society; the name was changed from von Duve to de Duve. They... I think he ended up being the chief of police of the city and one of his sons, my grandfather, became what is called a notaire, a lawyer. And my father, who was the youngest son of Antoine de Duve, was supposed to study to become a notaire himself, a notary... a lawyer, I suppose you would say, but his father died before he could succeed and so he could not do that. The succession went to a brother-in-law of his and so he did the next best thing and started a real estate business.
