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George Emil Palade

George Emil Palade (b. November 19, 1912, in Iaşi, Romania) is a Romanian-born American cell biologist. In 1974, he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Albert Claude and Christian de Duve, for his discoveries concerning the structure and function of organelles in biological cells.

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Biography

George Palade received a M.D. in 1940 from the Carol Davila School of Medicine of the University of Bucharest, Romania. He was a member of the faculty of that school until 1945 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 was a professor at the Rockefeller Institute (1958-1973), Yale University Medical School (1973-1990), and University of California, San Diego (1990-present).

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.

Alongside the Nobel Prize, he received the National Medal of Science in 1986.

At the Rockefeller Institute, Palade used electron microscopy to study the internal organization of such cell structures as mitochondria, chloroplasts, the Golgi apparatus, and others. His most important discovery was related made while using an experimental strategy known as a pulse-chase experiment. 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.^[1]

His name has become attached to the 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 (Weibel ER, Palade GE. New cytoplasmic components in arterial endothelia. J Cell Biol 1964;23:101-112).

Palade is married to Marilyn Farquhar, a cell biologist at the University of California, San Diego.