George Emil Palade

Created by Olivia Neculiţă

George Emil Palade was a famous Romanian cell biologist and physiologist whose work laid the foundations for modern cell biology.

He won the 1974 Nobel Prize “for discoveries concerning the structural and functional organization of the cell”.

He was a professor at the Rockefeller and Yale universities and founding member of the American Society for Cell Biology .

George Emil Palade was born in 1912 in Iasi, eastern Romania. He attended Alexandru Hasdeu High school in Buzau before studying Medicine at the University of Bucharest in 1930. In 1940s, he received a 2-year fellowship as a visiting professor at the Rockefeller University in New York City. In 1953, he became associate member of the Rockefeller University, and in 1956, he worked there as a professor of cell biology.

Biography

In 1950s, Palade developed a method of separating cell components, known as “cell fractionation”, in which cells are broken apart and components are separated based on their density, using a centrifuge.

He discovered the ribosome, and explained the way proteins are transported out of the cell.

In 1964, he gave his name to Weibel-Palade bodies (which he identified with the anatomist Ewald Weibel), components of the cells which make up the thin lining of blood vessels and the heart and which play an important role in blood coagulation.

In 1973, he moved to Yale, where he became the chairman of the new department of cell biology.

George Emil Palade

Stockholm,10 December 1974

In 1974, he received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for his contributions to the understanding of

cell structure, chemistry and function (shared with Albert Claude and Christian de Duve).