George Palade Papers

1974 Nobel laureate in Physiology or Medicine with Albert Claude, Christian de Duve for their discoveries concerning "the structural and functional organization of the cell". Palade added important methodological improvements both to the differential centrifugation and to the electron microscopy. In particular he became instrumental in combining the two techniques, often in combination, in order to obtain biologically basic information. His early work, largely in collaboration with K. Porter was mainly descriptive, morphological, and was devoted to components in the area of the cell outside its nucleus, the cytoplasm. In particular they studied a network of submicroscopic membranes, called the endoplasmic reticulum, originally discovered by Claude and Porter. They showed that the reticulum can be described as a multiply folded, more or less deflated sack occupying most of the cytoplasm. Palade discovered and described small granular components now known under the name of ribosomes covering the outside of the membranes and he showed, with other groups, that the ribosomes carry out the protein synthesis in the cell. In a series of extremely elegant papers he and his coworkers showed how in secretory cells the secretory proteins, produced by the ribosomes on the outside of the reticulum enter the space between its membranes, migrate to a special organelle, the Golgi complex, where they are changed to a form suitable for secretion. Many fascinating details of the secretory process were demonstrated. The work of Palade includes many other important structural-functional analyses of different cellular components.