Nobel Laureate Ready To Head Back to Lab

Nobel laureate Günter Blobel.

When Günter Blobel and David Sabatini first proposed the signal hypothesis in 1971, the whole thing was simply ignored. There was not a shred of evidence to support it. Since then Blobel, a professor at Rockefeller University, has proven the theory that explains how newly synthesized proteins are dispatched to a target in the cell and transported across the membrane of the target organelle. This year Blobel won the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for his research.

"It was not just one eureka experiment, but a series of experiments done over a period of more than 25 years to obtain more and more evidence," explains Blobel. Along the way he faced skepticism, resistance to change, and sometimes lost funding because he was creating a new way to look at cell biology. If criticisms did not get to the core of the scientific issues, then they...