REVIEW -A LIFE FOR NOBEL PRIZE, REMEMBER GEORGE EMIL PALADE

Abstract

In 2012 were accomplished 100 years from birth of George Emil Palade. He was born in Iași, Romania, in November 19, 1912, and after high school, in 1929 he was admitted in “Carol Davila†Medicine Faculty from Bucharest. During university years, he was especially interested in anatomy and biochemistry. After university, he made and sustained the PhD thesis, which had the subject: “Urinary tube in cetacean Delphynus delphy†and he obtained the title of Doctor in medicine and surgery in 1940. After six years, as assistant and then associate professor in Anatomy Department, G.E. Palade emigrated in USA to continue his post-doctorate studies. He will became USA citizen in 1952.

In a first period of 26 years (1947-1973), G.E. Palade made his researches in Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, having as main preoccupations the cells’ fractioning method and researches of animal and vegetal tissues in electronic microscope. He improved these methods conceiving the Palade fixing solution, ultracentrifugation in sucrose density gradient, the “pulse-chase†process in experiments with radioactive isotopes and the autoradiography in electronic microscopy.  For the first time, in cellular ultrastructure and physiology, he described the mitochondria, nervous fibers of C type, interneuronal and neuromuscular synapses, the ribosomes (Palade granules), the role of rough endoplasmic reticullum in protein synthesis, the atrial specific granules, the messangial cells from renal corpuscles, the different types of intercellular junctions, the plasmalemal vesicles from endothelial cells and the transcytosis phenomenon, the Weibel-Palade corpuscles from endothelia, the peripheral vesicles of Golgi complex and intracellular vectorial transport of secretion proteins, the nature of zymogene granules, membranes’ biogenesis etc.

In 1973, G.E. Palade accepted the proposal of Yale University School of Medicine to establish the “Yale Center Molecular Medicineâ€. Here, he continues the research of secretion process in pancreas exocrine cells. In 1974, the Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology was assigned to three researchers from Cellular Biology domain -Albert Claude, Christian De Duve and George Emil Palade. The Nobel Committee motivation was: “for discoveries concerning the functional organization of the cell that were seminal events in the development of modern cell biologyâ€. In 1990, G.E. Palade go to University of California, in San Diego School of Medicine La Jolla, where he continues the study of intracellular vectorial transport of proteins using the immune-isolation procedure for subcellular components’ isolation.

In biologic research domain, G.E. Palade was the partisan of multidisciplinary approach and has collaborators from specialization as biochemistry, physics, medicine, zoology, botany etc. He always considered that researches from cellular and molecular biomedicine would be useful to elucidate numerous diseases from cellular pathology domain.

George Emil Palade died in October 7, 2008.