George Palade received a M.D. in 1940 from the School of Medicine of the University of Bucharest, Romania. He was a member of the faculty of that school until 1945 when he went to the United States for postdoctoral studies. There, he joined Prof. Albert Claude at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research. In 1952, Palade became a naturalized citizen of the United States. He was a professor at the Rockefeller Institute (1958-1973), Yale University Medical School (1973-1990), and UCSD (1990-present).
He won the 1974 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for describing the structure and function of organelles in biological cells
In 1986, he received the National Medal of Science, USA.
At the Rockefeler Institute, Palade used electron microscopy to study the internal organization of such cell structures as mitochondria, chloroplasts, the Golgi apparatus, and others. His most important discovery was related to ribosomes.