George Palade dies

George Palade, one of the founders of cell biology who first visualized key cellular structures such as mitochondria and ribosomes, died yesterday (October 7) at the age of 95. "George Palade was a real giant of the biological sciences in the last century," Gunter Blobel, a former postdoc in Palade's laboratory who also won a Nobel for his discovery of protein targeting, told The Scientist. Palade was born in 1912, in Moldavia, Romania. His father, a professor of philosophy, hoped that Palade would follow in his footsteps, but Palade was more interested in what he called "tangibles." He went to medical school and, despite a strong interest in microscopy, completed his training as a medical doctor. He graduated from medical school in 1940, did a short stint as a practicing internist (and served as a medic for the Romanian Army during World War II), then shifted his focus to anatomy research. In 1946, Palade met Albert Claude, the Nobel-winning biologist who pioneered the technique of cell fractionation, and was one of the early users of electron microscopy. Claude invited Palade to join him at Rockefeller University. During the next 27 years at Rockefeller, Palade began uncovering the secrets of the cell. Using the electron microscope, he defined the structure of mitochondria and visualized small components of cytoplasm, later called ribosomes. This pioneering work won him the Nobel Prize in 1974. Working with Keith Porter and Sanford Palay -- both at Rockefeller-- Palade continued to refine the details of endoplasmic reticulum and the intricate structure of chemical synapses. Much of Palade's work also provided a foundation for future research on the Golgi apparatus. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Palade expanded his work, and proved Claude's theory that the microsomes identified in cell fractionation were fragments of the endoplasmic reticulum. He investigated the secretory paths of the guinea pig pancreatic exocrine cell, doing many experiments in vivo. Eventually, he began using radioautography, during which he tagged and tracked radioactive proteins, revealing the processes ribosomes and endoplasmic reticulum use to synthesize and process proteins produced by the exocrine cells.Palade received a Lasker Award in 1966 and the National Medal of Science in 1986. In 1973, Palade went to Yale Medical School to start its department of cell biology, and focused his research on membrane trafficking. Within just a few years, Yale became one of the leading centers in that field worldwide. In 1990, the University of California, San Diego, School of Medicine recruited Palade to act as its dean of scientific affairs. He retired from that position in 2001, but remained on as professor emeritus.According to the ISI database, he is the author of 325 papers and has been cited more than 45,200 times. His most highly cited paper, on electron microscopy in the Journal of Experimental Medicine, is cited more than 3,300 times.As a mentor, Palade could be brutally honest to his students, but praised them when they deserved it, recalled Elizabeth Sztul, a postdoc in his Yale laboratory in the early 1980s who worked with him during his discovery of transcytosis (protein trafficking). "He was truly inspirational," Sztul told The Scientist. "He led by example. He would make you think, he wouldn't just tell you what to do, he would make you figure it out on your own."As a young postdoc in Palade's lab at Rockefeller in the late 1960s, Blobel said it was at Palade's urging that he became a biochemist. "He always challenged me to do the difficult thing." Blobel has kept copies of drafts of the two papers for which he won the Nobel Prize, which are covered in Palade's corrections, front and back. As his mentor, Palade taught him to approach everything from a skeptical point of view, Blobel recalled -- so he only accepted some of Palade's corrections.As a young glycobiologist and fellow faculty member at UCSD, Ajit Varki (still at UCSD) was amazed at Palade's ability to synthesize new information and give insight. "By the time he was in his 80s, I'd still get calls from his secretary saying he wanted to see me," Varki told The Scientist. "You'd go to his office and he would be asking very probing questions about what you were doing, and understanding more than your own colleagues. That was remarkable."Andrea Gawrylewski mail@the-scientist.com

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