George Emil Palade was born on November 19, 1912, inIași, Romania. Palade's father was a professor of philosophy at theUniversity of Iași and his mother was a high school teacher. Palade received hisM.D. in 1940 from theCarol Davila School of Medicine inBucharest.
In 1952, Palade became anaturalized citizen of the United States. He worked at the Rockefeller Institute (1958–1973), and was a professor atYale University Medical School (1973–1990), andUniversity 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 atLa Jolla, California.[12]
In 1970, he was awarded theLouisa Gross Horwitz Prize fromColumbia University, together withRenato Dulbecco (winner of the 1975Nobel 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",[13] related to his previous research carried out at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research.[14] His Nobel lecture, delivered on December 12, 1974, was entitled:"Intracellular Aspects of the Process of Protein Secretion",[15] published in 1992 by the Nobel Prize Foundation,[16][17] He was elected an Honorarymember of the Romanian Academy in 1975. He received the Golden Plate Award of theAmerican Academy of Achievement in 1975.[18] In 1981, Palade became a founding member of theWorld Cultural Council.[19] In 1985, he became the founding editor of theAnnual Review of Cell and Developmental Biology.[20]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 usedelectron microscopy to study the internal organization of such cell structures asribosomes,mitochondria,chloroplasts, the Golgi apparatus, and others. His most important discovery was made while using an experimental strategy known as apulse-chase analysis. In the experiment Palade and his colleagues were able to confirm an existing hypothesis that a secretory pathway exists and that theRough ER and theGolgi apparatus function together.[4]
The following is a concise excerpt from Palade's Autobiography appearing in the Nobel Award documents[10]
In the 1960s, I continued the work on the secretory process using in parallel or in succession two different approaches. The first relied exclusively on cell fractionation, and was developed in collaboration withPhilip Siekevitz,Lewis Joel Greene,Colvin Redman,David Sabatini, andYutaka Tashiro; it led to the characterization of the zymogen granules and to the discovery of the segregation of secretory products in the cisternal space of the endoplasmic reticulum. The second approach relied primarily on radioautography, and involved experiments on intact animals or pancreatic slices which were carried out in collaboration with Lucien Caro and especially James Jamieson. This series of investigations produced a good part of our current ideas on the synthesis and intracellular processing of proteins for export. A critical review of this line of research is presented in the Nobel Lecture.[15]
He married Irina Malaxa (born in 1919, the daughter of industrialistNicolae Malaxa) on June 12, 1941. The couple had two children: Georgia (born in 1943) and Theodore (born in 1949).[24] After his wife died in 1969, Palade marriedMarilyn Farquhar, a cell biologist at theUniversity of California, San Diego.[25]
^Pauly, John E., ed. (1987).The American Association of Anatomists, 1888-1987: essays on the history of anatomy in America and a report on the membership--past and present (1st ed.). Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins.ISBN978-0-683-06800-9.
Haulică, I (2002). "[Professor doctor George Emil Palade at 90 years of age]".Revista medico-chirurgicală a Societății de Medici și Naturaliști din Iași.107 (2):223–5.ISSN0300-8738.PMID12638263.
Porter, K R (July 1983). "An informal tribute to George E. Palade".The Journal of Cell Biology.97 (1): D3–7.ISSN0021-9525.PMID6345553.
Tashiro, Y (January 1975). "[Accomplishment of Drs. Albert Calude and George E. Palade and the birth of cell biology]".Tanpakushitsu Kakusan Koso.20 (1):74–6.ISSN0039-9450.PMID1094498.
