George Emil Palade shared the 1974 Nobel Prize in medicine or physiology with 2 Belgian medical researchers, Albert Claude (1898-1983) and Christian Rene de Duve (1917-), for work on the structure and function of the internal components of cells. Palade developed tissue preparation methods and centrifugation techniques and conducted electron microscopic studies of several cellular structures. He studied the internal organization of such organelles as mitochondria, chloroplasts, and the Golgi apparatus. His most important discovery was that microsomes are part of the endoplasmic reticulum and have a high RNA content, for which reason they are called ribosomes. Palade was born on November 19, 1912, in Iasi (Jassy), the former capital of Moldavia, in northeastern Romania (near the Soviet border, about 200 miles northeast of Bucharest). His father was a professor of philosophy at the University of Iasi, and his mother was an elementary schoolteacher. Palade attended elementary school in Iasi and subsequently studied at the Lyceum Al Hasdeu in Buzau in southeastern Romania (about 60 miles northeast of Bucharest). (The Lyceum is the equivalent of an American secondary school and junior college combined.) Palade graduated in 1930 and entered the Medical School of the University of Bucharest. After 6 years of clinical training and a dissertation on morphologic and physiologic studies of the uriniferous tubules of the porpoise, Palade was awarded a medical degree in 1940. In 1941, he became an instructor at the University of Bucharest, where he was assistant professor of anatomy from 1941 to 1945. He was named associate professor in 1945. During World War II, he served in the Romanian medical corps. In 1946, Palade received a 2-year fellowship as a visiting investigator at Rockefeller University (then called the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research) in New York City. While in New York, Palade met his future colleague Albert Claude, who asked him to join his research group at the institute. Claude was a pioneer in electron microscopy and the cell fractionation process (the separation of the constituents of a cell by ultracentrifugation). In 1953, Palade was named an associate member of the Rockefeller Institute, and in 1956, he was promoted to full professor of cell biology. During these years at the Rockefeller Institute, Palade and his associates elucidated and explained the pathways of protein synthesis and enzyme secretion in the pancreatic exocrine cell. Palade left the Rockefeller Institute in 1973 to become a professor of cell biology at Yale University in New Haven, Conn, where he focused his attention on another process central to biology—the synthesis of cellular and intracellular membranes. Palade was a prolific writer, and by 1967, he had published more than 100 medical and scientific articles. In addition, he belonged to many national and international organizations and received numerous prestigious awards, including the Passano Award in Medical Research of the Passano Foundation (1964) and the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award (1966). In 1986, he was awarded the US National Medal of Science. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has also served as editor of the Journal of Cell Biology, which he founded in 1955. Palade became a US citizen in 1952. In 1990, Palade was named Professor of the Division of Cellular and Molecular Medicine and Dean for Scientific Affairs at the School of Medicine of the University of California at San Diego. As one of the founders of cell biology and the recipient of the Nobel Prize, George Palade was honored on a stamp issued in 2001 by his native Romania.