George palade and keith porter

The challenge for cell biologists in the mid-twentieth century was not unlike the challenge for astronomers. Belgian biologist Albert Claude put it, “the cell was as distant from us as the stars and galaxies.” At that time, the inner workings of the cell, millions of times smaller than the head of a pin, were invisible to even the best light microscopes.

The electron microscope, first invented by German engineers in 1931, proposed a solution to the problem of cell biology with its much higher magnification power.

George palade and keith porter jr

But preparing live cells for the technology proved an obstinate hurdle. In the 1940s and 1950s, Dr. Claude and George E. Palade, a graduate student in the Claude laboratory at The Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, modernized the field of cell biology by removing this hurdle.

For this work and their subsequent discoveries of the structure and function of cellular components, they were awarded shares of the 1974 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

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