George Emil Palade - Biography

Biography

George Emil Palade was born on November 19, 1912 in Iaşi, Romania; his father was a professor of philosophy at the University and his mother was a high school teacher. George E. Palade received his M.D. in 1940 from the Carol Davila School of Medicine, in Bucharest, Romania. He was a member of the faculty there until 1946, when he went to the United States for postdoctoral studies. There, he joined Prof. Albert Claude at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research.

In 1952, Palade became a naturalized citizen of the United States. He worked at the Rockefeller Institute (1958–1973), and was a professor at Yale University Medical School (1973–1990), and University of California, San Diego (1990–2008). At UCSD, Palade was Professor of Medicine in Residence (Emeritus) in the Department of Cellular & Molecular Medicine, as well as a Dean for Scientific Affairs (Emeritus), in the School of Medicine at La Jolla, California.

In 1970, he was awarded the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University together with Renato Dulbecco co-winner of 1974 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for discoveries concerning the functional organization of the cell that were seminal events in the development of modern cell biology", related to his previous research carried out at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research. His Nobel lecture, delivered on December 12, 1974, was entitled: "Intracellular Aspects of the Process of Protein Secretion", published in 1992 by the Nobel Prize Foundation, . He was elected an Honorary Member of the Romanian Academy in 1975. In 1988 he was also elected an Honorary Member of the American-Romanian Academy of Arts and Sciences (ARA).

Palade was the first Chairman of the Department of Cell Biology at Yale University. Presently, the Chair of Cell Biology at Yale is named the "George Palade Professorship".

At the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, Palade used electron microscopy to study the internal organization of such cell structures as ribosomes, mitochondria, chloroplasts, the Golgi apparatus, and others. His most important discovery was made while using an experimental strategy known as a pulse-chase analysis. In the experiment Palade and his colleagues were able to confirm an existing hypothesis that a secretory pathway exists and that the Rough ER and the Golgi apparatus function together.

He focused on Weibel-Palade bodies (a storage organelle unique to the endothelium, containing von Willebrand factor and various proteins) which he described together with the Swiss anatomist Ewald R. Weibel.

Palade is survived by his wife Marilyn Farquhar, a cell biologist at the University of California, San Diego.