\tBrowse the article George Emil Palade\tGeorge Emil Palade
Palade, George Emil (1912-), a Romanian-born cell biologist, shared the 1974 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine with Christian René de Duve of Belgium and Albert Claude of the United States for trailblazing work in cell biology. Palade's contributions involved the development of electron microscopy, his discovery of the ribosome, and his studies of the Golgi apparatus.
The son of a philosophy professor and a schoolteacher, Palade became a medical student at the University of Bucharest in 1930. He completed his clinical training and doctoral thesis on the microscopic anatomy of the kidney of a cetacean before receiving his M.D. degree in 1940. After serving in the Romanian Army medical corps during World War II (1939–1945), he emigrated to the United States in 1946 to do research in biology at New York University. He later joined a group of pioneering electron microscopists in the pathology department at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research.
In 1958, he became a professor of cytology at Rockefeller Institute. His studies of the guinea pig pancreas revealed that microsomes' function was related to internal cell transport, rather than metabolism. His discovery of the high RNA content in microsomes led to a new coinage, ribosome. He also demonstrated that protein production takes place in RNA strands in ribosomes attached to the endoplasmic reticulum, and that the resulting proteins move through vacuoles into the fluid outside the cell.
From 1973 to 1990, Palade directed studies in cell biology at Yale University Medical School. He then became dean of scientific affairs in the division of cellular and molecular medicine at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), as well as a member of the UCSD Cancer Center Glycobiology Program. His research, which focused on identifying the differences between tumor vessels and normal vessels, contributed to the effort to identify and destroy tumors by killing the blood vessels that nurture them.