Palade, George Emil [key], 1912–2008, 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. From 1990 until 2001, when he retired, he was at the Univ. of California, San Diego, where he was the medical school's dean for scientific affairs. in 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 ribosomes and other elements of cell biology. Palade's work led to an understanding of the cell as a sophisticated system rather than a collection of components whose functions were unknown.
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