Palade, George Emil

Palade, George Emil, 1912–, American cell biologist, b. Iaşi, Romania, M.D. Univ. of Bucharest, 1940. He was a faculty member at the Rockefeller Institute (now Rockefeller Univ.) from 1946 to 1973, when he joined the Yale Medical School. Palade received the 1974 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine with Albert Claude and Christian de Duve for contributing to knowledge about the structural and functional organization of the cell. He combined two techniques pioneered by Claude for biological applications—electron microscopy and differential centrifugation—to discover basic morphological information about cells. Palade's work led to an understanding of the cell as a sophisticated system rather than a collection of components whose functions were unknown.

The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2007, Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.

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