George Emil Palade

George Emil Palade was a Romanian-American cell biologist whose innovations in electron microscopy and in the technique of cell fractionation, which separates a cell's internal components for individual study, together laid the technical foundations of modern molecular cell biology. Using these methods, Palade discovered and first described in 1955 the small, dense granules now called ribosomes, found attached to the network of internal membranes known as the endoplasmic reticulum, which he and later researchers established as the cellular machinery responsible for actually building proteins from genetic instructions. Palade went on to work out much of the basic pathway by which cells manufacture, package and export proteins meant for use outside the cell, tracing their route in detail from the ribosome through the endoplasmic reticulum and the Golgi apparatus to eventual secretion, a body of work that gave biologists their first coherent picture of the internal cellular machinery underlying protein production and secretion. Palade shared the 1974 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Albert Claude and Christian de Duve for their discoveries concerning the structural and functional organization of the cell, and he later held senior research and administrative positions at Yale University and the University of California, San Diego.