George E. Palade

George E. Palade’s first marriage was to Irina Malaxa which produced two children. His wife predeceased him.

He married Marilyn Gist Farquhar, a cell biologist, in 1970. He had two step-children from this marriage.

He died on October 7, 2008, at the age of 95.

George Emil Palade was born on November 19, 1912, in Iași, Romania. His father, Emil Palade, was a professor of philosophy and his mother, Constanta Cantemir-Palade, was a teacher.

He grew up in an intellectually stimulating environment and his parents instilled in him a great love for books and education.

His father hoped that he would follow in his footsteps and study philosophy but young George was more interested in the sciences. So he joined the School of Medicine of the University of Bucharest in 1930.

While studying medicine he developed a strong interest in basic biomedical sciences and was greatly influenced by Francisc Rainer and André Boivin, professors of Anatomy and Biochemistry, respectively.

He started working in the Anatomy laboratory while still in medical school and also underwent six years of hospital training. He did his doctoral thesis in microscopic anatomy on the nephron of the cetacean Delphinus Delphi and received his M.D. in 1940.

George E. Palade embarked on an academic career and became a professor at the Carol Davila University where he served until 1946. Then he went to the United States to do postdoctoral research.

He went to the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, now Rockefeller University where he joined Albert Claude in his research. Initially Palade worked on cell fractionation procedures and collaborated with Hogeboom and Schneider to develop the "sucrose method" for the homogenization and fractionation of liver tissue.

He also performed vital studies on the internal organization of such cell structures as mitochondria, chloroplasts, the Golgi apparatus, and others. He had a particular interest in microsomes, and became the first to observe what was subsequently named ribosomes.

In 1952, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States and was appointed a professor of cytology at Rockefeller Institute in 1958.

In the 1960s, Palade worked on the secretory process using two different approaches, the first of which relied exclusively on cell fractionation. He collaborated with Philip Siekevitz, Lewis Joel Greene, Colvin Redman, and others on this approach which culminated in the discovery of the segregation of secretory products in the cisternal space of the endoplasmic reticulum.

Palade was the first person to observe ribosomes using an electron microscope. The ribosome is a cellular machine which is responsible for the synthesis of proteins in cells and is found in all cellular organisms.

In collaboration with his colleagues he performed a series of investigations on membrane biogenesis in eukaryotic cells using as model objects either the endoplasmic reticulum of mammalian hepatocytes or the thylakoid membranes of a green alga. These studies shed new light on endoplasmic reticulum (ER), a type of organelle in the cells of eukaryotic organisms.