History

The Department of Cell Biology at Yale draws on a rich history rooted in the medical school’s early forays into the fields of anatomy, microscopy and histology. In 1858, Rudolph Virchow articulated what became the accepted form of the cell theory, Omnis cellula e cellula (“every cell is derived from a [preexisting] cell.”) He founded the medical discipline of cellular pathology, namely, that all diseases are basically disturbances of cells. It followed that if cells comprised the organism and could grow and divide and that diseases arose in cells, cells were extremely important subjects for research and teaching. Rapid advances were being made at the time, especially in Europe, in describing tissues, cells, and cell constituents and it was recognized that the school needed to include the study of cells in its curriculum. At Yale, the study of microscopy as a separate entity in the curriculum was introduced in 1862. A chair in Pathology and Microscopy was established in 1867 and Moses Clarke White served variously as Professor of Histology, Microscopy, and Pathology until 1900. In 1880, the faculty recommended separating the disciplines of pathology and histology, thus laying the foundations for a separate academic unit devoted to the study of the cell. Harry Burr Ferris was the E. K. Hunt Professor and Chairman of Anatomy and taught histology and anatomy from 1892 to 1933. Ross G. Harrison, who developed the technique of tissue culture to study outgrowth of fibers from nerve cells, came to Yale as Bronson Professor of Comparative Anatomy in 1907 and held the title of Professor of Embryology in the Department of Anatomy.

Anatomy departments in the first part of the twentieth century traditionally had four sections or parts organized around their teaching missions—gross anatomy, microscopic anatomy, neuroanatomy, and embryology. At Yale, the Department of Anatomy was composed mostly of classical anatomists, and it was recognized that to remain current and relevant, the department needed greater representation in the newly emerging field of cell biology. Sanford L. Palay, who took elegant electron micrographs of the nervous system, had joined the faculty in 1949 but left in 1956. Russell J. Barrnett was recruited to Yale from Harvard in 1959 in order to build up the department’s strength in cell biology. Yale became preeminent in the field in 1973, when George E. Palade, along with Marilyn Farquhar and James Jamieson, came to Yale from Rockefeller University to form the Section of Cell Biology. A graduate program in Cell Biology was established at the same time. Since then, over a hundred students have received their Ph. D. degrees in the department. The department teaches “Molecules to Systems,” designed to provide first-year medical students with a current and comprehensive review of biologic structure and function at the cellular, tissue, and organ system levels.

Palade’s group is known for its integrated morphological and biochemical studies of subcellular components. These were known to exist or discovered in the early 1950s as the result of the introduction of electron microscopy in cell research.  The work relied heavily on the development of progressively refined cell fractionation procedures for the isolation of organelles.  These integrated studies, using electron microscopy supplemented by autoradiography and by immunocytochemistry, led to the identification of the compartments of the secretory (exocytic) pathway; vesicular carriers at important relays along the pathway; the energy requiring steps; and isolation and partial characterization of different classes of vesicular carriers.

In 1974, George Palade, along with Albert Claude and Christian DeDuve, received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. In announcing the prize, the Nobel committee said of Palade: “He 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. His early work, largely in collaboration with K. Porter was mainly descriptive, morphological and was devoted to components in the area of the cell outside its nucleus, the cytoplasm. In particular they studied a network of submicroscopic membranes, called the endoplasmic reticulum, originally discovered by Claude and Porter. They showed that the reticulum can be described as a multiply folded, more or less deflated sack occupying most of the cytoplasm. Palade discovered and described small granular components now known under the name of ribosomes covering the outside of the membranes, and he showed, with other groups, that the ribosomes carry out the protein synthesis in the cell. In a series of extremely elegant papers he and his coworkers showed how in secretory cells the secretory proteins, produced by the ribosomes on the outside of the reticulum enter the space between its membranes, migrate to a special organelle, the Golgi complex, where they are changed to a form suitable for secretion. Many fascinating details of the secretory process were demonstrated. The work of Palade includes many other important structural-functional analyses of different cellular components.” This body of knowledge has been extended by other laboratories at Yale to the endocytic pathway and to the processing of membrane proteins along these different pathways. General principles underlying the process of membrane biogenesis have also been developed.

The Sections of Cell Biology and Cytology were merged in 1979. The primary faculty at that time consisted of George Palade (Chair of the Section of Cell Biology), Marilyn G. Farquhar (whom he married in 1970), James D. Jamieson, and Russell J. Barrnett (professors); Thomas L. Lentz (associate professor); and Anne Hubbard, Richard Galardy, and J. David Castle (assistant professors). George Palade stepped down as Chair of the Section in 1983 when the Section became the Department of Cell Biology. James Jamieson was the first Chair and resumed this position as Interim Chair in 2007. Ari Helenius became chair in 1992, followed by Pietro De Camilli in 1997 and Ira Mellman in 2000.

In 2008, James Rothman was recruited and named the Fergus F. Wallace Professor of Biomedical Sciences and the next Chairman of Cell Biology. His research involves study of the molecular mechanisms and regulation of vesicular traffic and membrane fusion in cells. Rothman received the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research in 2002 and the Kavli Prize in Neuroscience in 2010. In 2008, Rothman established the Center for High Throughput Cell Biology located at Yale’s West Campus in West Haven. This center carries out genome-wide screening to establish patterns of gene function in cellular systems.