"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 did not sway him.
Blobel and Sabatini, a professor at the New York University School of Medicine, hypothesized that an amino acid sequence in the first part of a growing protein chain contains the information that determines where the protein ends up in the cell. They added this information must be cleaved off with an enzyme to yield the mature form of the protein that cells use.1
For another year Blobel hunted for a membrane preparation that would not wipe out translation. ...
