Michel Macheboeuf

Michel Macheboeuf (19 October 1900 – 20 August 1953) was a French physician scientist who served as a head of the biochemistry department of the Pasteur Institute and studied blood lipids. He has been called the father of plasma lipoproteins.

Macheboeuf was born in Châtel-Guyon, France, son of the physician Elie Macheboeuf. After studies at Clermont-Ferrand and Paris, he joined Gabriel Bertrand’s laboratory at the Pasteur Institute. He also studied with S.P.L. Sørensen in Copenhagen as a Rockefeller Fellow. Along with Bertrand, he found lipids in blood plasma and they found that they could be complexed with albumin (he called it as "cenapse").^[1] The principle is still used in the lipid albumin index used in clinical studies, which is the amount of lipid that remains water-soluble after addition of albumin. Im 1929 he isolated lipoprotein by precipitating using a neutral 50% ammonium sulfate extract of serum and then lowering the pH to 3.8.^[2] Macheboeuf also studied tuberculosis and examined the effect of high pressure on bacteria and viruses. He married Simone Bezou and they had three daughters. He died from a lung infection.

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