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PERSONALITĂŢI NOTORII
A TRIBUTE TO GEORGE EMIL PALADE
Daniela DUCA
Intercultural Assistant 08/09, 7739 Farinon Center, Lafayette College, Easton,
PA 18042, USA, ducad@lafayette.edu
The most pride one could ever feel about the region he or she is coming from is at
the thought that it gave rise to beautiful minds and achieved personalities like that of
George Emil Palade. G. E. Palade was born in 1912 in Iasi, the old capital of Moldova
[4]. As his mother was a teacher and his father a professor of philosophy, he acquired a
special kind of respect for books and knowledge in general. He completed successfully
a Lyceum in Buzau at the age of 18 and ventured himself for 10 years in the realm of
medicine in Bucharest [4,6].
Biology was fascinating to him from early on. In medical school, for instance, he
wrote his doctorate thesis on the dolphin nephron, or the kidney’s ltering unit [6].
After the world wars Palade, encouraged by his professors, left for the United States
to further continue his studies and research [4]. Here, his passion for biology increased
tremendously. He started at the New York University, but he soon moved to the
Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research to work with Albert Claude and his electron
microscopy research group mainly on cell fractionation or separation procedures [6].
School is an important institution in our society. It expands people’s horizons, it
is a cornucopia of knowledge and facts, it is a source for ideas, and it is the institution
that one goes through to become a more complex, erudite and cultivated personality.
It is exactly this kind of institution that Palade was sure the cell must also have. So,
when people go through school they specialize in a certain domain, they are thus ready
to work in that domain. Palade probably thought that the cell must have the organelle
to transform the storage molecule DNA into a protein, functioning at a speci c cell
site. He was right, the cell did contain this type of institution, and it actually contained
thousands of them. Palade described these as “small particulates of the cytoplasm”,
which came to be later known as ribosomes [3].
The way he came about describing these ne particulates was by combining curiosity
for the unknown and technological sawiness. In other words, Palade appreciated the
power of the electron microscope and he tried to improve cell xation and fractionation
methods in order to see closer the constitution of the cell, the principal unit of life.
That is how he came to de ne the mitochondria and describe the ribosomes [4]. Palade
observed that these particulates were small in size, round in shape, sometimes bound to
the endoplasmatic reticulum and they also were more abundant in rapidly proliferating
cells. His further studies suggest that these particulates were actually ribonucleoproteins
[3], or particles possessing some protein functionality as well as RNA content.
The connections of these small particulates with the endoplasmatic reticulum and
their chemical content puzzled George Palade, but as Porter mentioned, “his mind
work[ed] as though especially trained to be logical” [6]. Hence, while still at Rockefeller