George Emil Palade
Encyclopedia
George Emil Palade (ˈd͡ʒe̯ord͡ʒe eˈmil paˈlade; November 19, 1912 – October 8, 2008) was a Romanian
cell biologist
. Described as "the most influential cell biologist ever", in 1974 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine, together with Albert Claude and Christian de Duve. The prize was granted for his innovations in electron microscopy and cell fractionation which together laid the foundations of modern molecular cell biology
. , the most notable discovery being the ribosomes of the endoplasmic reticulum
– which he first described in 1955.
Palade also received the U.S. National Medal of Science
in Biological Sciences for "pioneering discoveries of a host of fundamental, highly organized structures in living cells" in 1986, and was previously elected a Member of the US National Academy of Science in 1961.
, 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 microscope
to study the internal organization of such cell structures as ribosome
s, mitochondria, chloroplast
s, 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
.
"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 with Philip Siekevitz, Lewis Greene, Colvin Redman, David Sabatini and Yutaka 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.".
One notes also that the Nobel Prize
in Chemistry
was awarded in 2009 to Drs. Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Thomas A. Steitz
and Ada E. Yonath "for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome", discovered by Dr. George Emil Palade.
Romanians
The Romanians are an ethnic group native to Romania, who speak Romanian; they are the majority inhabitants of Romania....
cell biologist
Cell biology
Cell biology is a scientific discipline that studies cells – their physiological properties, their structure, the organelles they contain, interactions with their environment, their life cycle, division and death. This is done both on a microscopic and molecular level...
. Described as "the most influential cell biologist ever", in 1974 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine, together with Albert Claude and Christian de Duve. The prize was granted for his innovations in electron microscopy and cell fractionation which together laid the foundations of modern molecular cell biology
Cell biology
Cell biology is a scientific discipline that studies cells – their physiological properties, their structure, the organelles they contain, interactions with their environment, their life cycle, division and death. This is done both on a microscopic and molecular level...
. , the most notable discovery being the ribosomes of the endoplasmic reticulum
Endoplasmic reticulum
The endoplasmic reticulum is an organelle of cells in eukaryotic organisms that forms an interconnected network of tubules, vesicles, and cisternae...
– which he first described in 1955.
Palade also received the U.S. National Medal of Science
National Medal of Science
The National Medal of Science is an honor bestowed by the President of the United States to individuals in science and engineering who have made important contributions to the advancement of knowledge in the fields of behavioral and social sciences, biology, chemistry, engineering, mathematics and...
in Biological Sciences for "pioneering discoveries of a host of fundamental, highly organized structures in living cells" in 1986, and was previously elected a Member of the US National Academy of Science in 1961.
Biography
George Emil Palade was born on November 19, 1912 in IaşiIasi
Iași is the second most populous city and a municipality in Romania. Located in the historical Moldavia region, Iași has traditionally been one of the leading centres of Romanian social, cultural, academic and artistic life...
, Romania
Romania
Romania is a country located at the crossroads of Central and Southeastern Europe, on the Lower Danube, within and outside the Carpathian arch, bordering on the Black Sea...
; 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.
Doctor of Medicine
Doctor of Medicine is a doctoral degree for physicians. The degree is granted by medical schools...
in 1940 from the Carol Davila School of Medicine
Carol Davila University of Medicine and Pharmacy
Carol Davila University of Medicine and Pharmacy is a state-run health sciences University in Bucharest, Romania. It is the largest institution of its kind in Romania with over 2.865 employees, 1.654 teachers and over 4.800 students...
, in Bucharest, Romania
Romania
Romania is a country located at the crossroads of Central and Southeastern Europe, on the Lower Danube, within and outside the Carpathian arch, bordering on the Black Sea...
. 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
Albert Claude
Albert Claude was a Belgian biologist who shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1974 with Christian de Duve and George Emil Palade. He studied engineering, and then medicine...
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
Yale University
Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...
Medical School (1973–1990), and University of California, San Diego
University of California, San Diego
The University of California, San Diego, commonly known as UCSD or UC San Diego, is a public research university located in the La Jolla neighborhood of San Diego, California, United States...
(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
Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize
Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize for Biology or Biochemistry is an annual prize awarded by Columbia University to a researcher or group of researchers that have made an outstanding contribution in basic research in the fields of biology or biochemistry....
from Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
together with Renato Dulbecco
Renato Dulbecco
Renato Dulbecco is an Italian virologist who won a 1975 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on reverse transcriptase. In 1973 he was awarded the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University together with Theodore Puck and Harry Eagle. Dulbecco was the recipient of the Selman A...
co-winner of 1974 Nobel Prize
Nobel Prize
The Nobel Prizes are annual international awards bestowed by Scandinavian committees in recognition of cultural and scientific advances. The will of the Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, established the prizes in 1895...
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
Romanian Academy
The Romanian Academy is a cultural forum founded in Bucharest, Romania, in 1866. It covers the scientific, artistic and literary domains. The academy has 181 acting members who are elected for life....
in 1975. In 1988 he was also elected an Honorary Member of the American-Romanian Academy of Arts and Sciences
American-Romanian Academy of Arts and Sciences
The American Romanian Academy of Arts and Sciences ' is an internationally recognised academic research and educational institution that conducts and supports multidisciplinary studies in exact sciences, mathematics, natural sciences, and also supports the arts, linguistics, literature, political...
(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 microscope
Electron microscope
An electron microscope is a type of microscope that uses a beam of electrons to illuminate the specimen and produce a magnified image. Electron microscopes have a greater resolving power than a light-powered optical microscope, because electrons have wavelengths about 100,000 times shorter than...
to study the internal organization of such cell structures as ribosome
Ribosome
A ribosome is a component of cells that assembles the twenty specific amino acid molecules to form the particular protein molecule determined by the nucleotide sequence of an RNA molecule....
s, mitochondria, chloroplast
Chloroplast
Chloroplasts are organelles found in plant cells and other eukaryotic organisms that conduct photosynthesis. Chloroplasts capture light energy to conserve free energy in the form of ATP and reduce NADP to NADPH through a complex set of processes called photosynthesis.Chloroplasts are green...
s, the Golgi apparatus, and others. His most important discovery was made while using an experimental strategy known as a pulse-chase analysis
Pulse-chase analysis
In biochemistry and molecular biology, a pulse-chase analysis is a method for examining a cellular process occurring over time by successively exposing the cells to a labeled compound and then to the same compound in an unlabeled form...
. 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
Golgi apparatus
The Golgi apparatus is an organelle found in most eukaryotic cells. It was identified in 1898 by the Italian physician Camillo Golgi, after whom the Golgi apparatus is named....
function together.
He focused on Weibel-Palade bodies (a storage organelle unique to the endothelium
Endothelium
The endothelium is the thin layer of cells that lines the interior surface of blood vessels, forming an interface between circulating blood in the lumen and the rest of the vessel wall. These cells are called endothelial cells. Endothelial cells line the entire circulatory system, from the heart...
, containing von Willebrand factor
Von Willebrand factor
von Willebrand factor is a blood glycoprotein involved in hemostasis. It is deficient or defective in von Willebrand disease and is involved in a large number of other diseases, including thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura, Heyde's syndrome, and possibly hemolytic-uremic syndrome...
and various proteins) which he described together with the Swiss
Switzerland
Switzerland name of one of the Swiss cantons. ; ; ; or ), in its full name the Swiss Confederation , is a federal republic consisting of 26 cantons, with Bern as the seat of the federal authorities. The country is situated in Western Europe,Or Central Europe depending on the definition....
anatomist Ewald R. Weibel.
Palade is survived by his wife Marilyn Farquhar
Marilyn Farquhar
Marilyn Gist Farquhar is a pathologist and cellular biologist with a doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley. She has won the E. B. Wilson Medal and the FASEB Excellence in Science Award. She worked at Yale University from 1973 to 1990. She was married to Nobel Laureate George Emil...
, a cell biologist at the University of California, San Diego
University of California, San Diego
The University of California, San Diego, commonly known as UCSD or UC San Diego, is a public research university located in the La Jolla neighborhood of San Diego, California, United States...
.
Research note: Palade's coworkers and approach in the 1960s
The following is a concise excerpt from Palade's Autobiography appearing in the Nobel Award documents"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 with Philip Siekevitz, Lewis Greene, Colvin Redman, David Sabatini and Yutaka 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.".
One notes also that the Nobel Prize
Nobel Prize
The Nobel Prizes are annual international awards bestowed by Scandinavian committees in recognition of cultural and scientific advances. The will of the Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, established the prizes in 1895...
in Chemistry
Chemistry
Chemistry is the science of matter, especially its chemical reactions, but also its composition, structure and properties. Chemistry is concerned with atoms and their interactions with other atoms, and particularly with the properties of chemical bonds....
was awarded in 2009 to Drs. Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Thomas A. Steitz
Thomas A. Steitz
-Publications:* Steitz, T. A., et al. , nsls newsletter, .* Steitz, T. A., et al. , NSLS Activity Report .-External links:* , from the Office of Scientific and Technical Information, United States Department of Energy...
and Ada E. Yonath "for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome", discovered by Dr. George Emil Palade.
See also
- BiophysicsBiophysicsBiophysics is an interdisciplinary science that uses the methods of physical science to study biological systems. Studies included under the branches of biophysics span all levels of biological organization, from the molecular scale to whole organisms and ecosystems...
- BiosynthesisBiosynthesisBiosynthesis is an enzyme-catalyzed process in cells of living organisms by which substrates are converted to more complex products. The biosynthesis process often consists of several enzymatic steps in which the product of one step is used as substrate in the following step...
- Molecular biologyMolecular biologyMolecular biology is the branch of biology that deals with the molecular basis of biological activity. This field overlaps with other areas of biology and chemistry, particularly genetics and biochemistry...
- PhotosynthesisPhotosynthesisPhotosynthesis is a chemical process that converts carbon dioxide into organic compounds, especially sugars, using the energy from sunlight. Photosynthesis occurs in plants, algae, and many species of bacteria, but not in archaea. Photosynthetic organisms are called photoautotrophs, since they can...
- Protein biosynthesisProtein biosynthesisProtein biosynthesis is the process in which cells build or manufacture proteins. The term is sometimes used to refer only to protein translation but more often it refers to a multi-step process, beginning with amino acid synthesis and transcription of nuclear DNA into messenger RNA, which is then...
- RNARNARibonucleic acid , or RNA, is one of the three major macromolecules that are essential for all known forms of life....
s