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tal of Moldova, the Eastern province of Romania, into the family of a philosophy professor and a teacher. He was educated at the ‘B.P. Hasdeu’ College of Buzau, in Romania, where in 1930 he earned his bachelor’s degree, followed by graduating the School of Medicine of the University of Bucharest, Romania. His MD thesis had a rather unusual topic: the reconstitution of the nephron of the marine mammal Delphinus delphi. This included working with fishermen in the Black Sea to collect material, processing it, and then reconstituting the nephron out of serial sections. ‘It was an attempt to understand its structure in terms of the functional adaptation of a mammal to marine life’, Palade recalls. At the conclusion of ten years of medical training, Palade received his Ph.D. in 1940. Following graduation he served on the faculty as an Assistant, and then Associate Professor in the Institute of Anatomy at the University until 1946. By a custom of that time, individuals interested in research or academic medicine spent a year or two abroad pursuing advanced studies; Palade selected the lab of Robert Chambers at the Department of Biology at New York University. After just a few months in Chambers’ lab at NYU, Palade, fascinated by the budding electron microscopy approach to cell ultrastructure joined Albert Claude’s lab at the Rockefeller Institute, in the fall of 1946. He remained at Rockefeller for 27 years. During his long tenure in New York, Palade studied the internal organization of cells, making many important discoveries. After a period of exploration of the cell organization by electron microscopy, he decided to move to a correlated approach, based on both electron microscopy and biochemical analysis of isolated sub-cellular components. In fact, cell biology was founded on the principle of connection between the morphology of different sub-cellular J. Cell. Mol. Med. Vol 11, No 1, 2007 pp. 2-3