ROUGH ER: In 1966, a decade after first describing granules within cells that would come to be known as ribosomes, George Palade generated this transmission electron micrograph of the guinea pig pancreas illustrating the endoplasmic reticulum studded with ribosomes. COURTESY OF YALE UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF MEDICINEAs biologist James Rothman took the stage in Stockholm last year to accept a Nobel Prize for his work on vesicle transport, he gave credit to the man who used to occupy his office at Yale University. “Certainly the story of the work that led to my contributions begins with George Palade,” Rothman said. A grandfather of the field of cell biology and the founder of Rothman’s department, Palade discovered a process of intracellular transport—the movement of proteins from the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) to the Golgi apparatus and then into secretory vesicles.
In 1974, Palade himself took the stage to deliver his own Nobel lecture. The foundation for much of his work was electron microscopy (EM), which Palade used to visualize the components of the cell. During the 1950s, as a researcher at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (now Rockefeller University) in New York City, Palade was surrounded by the giants of EM—Keith Porter, Albert Claude, and others. As Palade described in his Nobel lecture, their advances in EM led to a “near avalanche of discoveries, rediscoveries, and redefinitions of subcellular components” in the early 1950s.
During this time, Palade and many of his colleagues were particularly interested in the pancreatic acinar cell, a veritable factory of protein synthesis and secretion. With advances in thin sectioning, ...
