In 1974, George E. Palade, of the Yale University School of Medicine, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with Albert Claude and Christian de Duve “for their discoveries concerning the structural and functional organization of the cell,” work based on their collaborations at Rockefeller University in New York.

Palade added important methodological improvements both to the differential centrifugation and to the electron microscopy. In particular he became instrumental in combining the two techniques, often in combination, in order to obtain biologically basic information.