George Emil Palade ForMemRS HonFRMS (Romanian pronunciation: [ˈdʒe̯ordʒe eˈmil paˈlade] ⓘ; November 19, 1912 – October 7, 2008) was a Romanian-American cell biologist.

At the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, Palade used electron microscopy to study the internal organization of such cell structures as ribosomes, mitochondria, chloroplasts, the Golgi apparatus, and others.

[4] He focused on Weibel-Palade bodies (a storage organelle unique to the endothelium, containing von Willebrand factor and various proteins) which he described together with the Swiss anatomist Ewald R.

[21] The following is a concise excerpt from Palade's Autobiography appearing in the Nobel Award documents[10] In the 1960s, I continued the work on the secretory process using in parallel or in succession two different approaches.

The first relied exclusively on cell fractionation, and was developed in collaboration with Philip Siekevitz, Lewis Joel Greene, Colvin Redman, David Sabatini, and Yutaka Tashiro; it led to the characterization of the zymogen granules and to the discovery of the segregation of secretory products in the cisternal space of the endoplasmic reticulum.

The second approach relied primarily on radioautography, and involved experiments on intact animals or pancreatic slices which were carried out in collaboration with Lucien Caro and especially James Jamieson.

[15]One notes also that the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded in 2009 to Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Thomas A. Steitz, and Ada E. Yonath "for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome", discovered by George Emil Palade.