1967 · Medicine · Discovery
The cell’s secretory pathway
George Emil Palade, James Jamieson and collaborators
The idea
Palade and colleagues traced how proteins move through a cell before being secreted.
Their experiments connected protein synthesis at the endoplasmic reticulum with movement through the Golgi apparatus and onward to secretion. The Nobel committee describes this as a series of studies by Palade and coworkers, rather than the work of an isolated inventor.
A life behind the work · 1912–2008
George Emil Palade
Born in Iași, Palade developed an interest in research while studying medicine in Bucharest. After wartime military service, he moved to the United States and joined Albert Claude’s laboratory at the Rockefeller Institute in 1946. Combining electron microscopy with biochemical methods, he and his collaborators revealed cellular structures and traced the movement of secretory proteins. He later worked at Yale and the University of California, San Diego. In 1974 he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Claude and Christian de Duve.
Biography & sources ↗