THE ROCKEFELLER UNIVERSITYBiologist Günter Blobel, who won a Nobel Prize in 1999 for his work on how cells organize the trafficking of proteins between intracellular compartments, died from cancer on Sunday (February 18) at NewYork-Presbyterian Weill Cornell Medical Center. He was 81.
“Günter was a towering figure in the scientific community who made fundamental contributions to our understanding of the most basic processes that underlie life on our planet,” Richard P. Lifton, president of The Rockefeller University, says in a statement. “His work revolutionized cell biology, demonstrating that seemingly impenetrable problems could be understood in molecular detail.”
Born in 1936 in the German town of Waltersdorf—now Niegoslawice in Poland—Blobel grew up among seven siblings in what he would later refer to as “a perfect 19th-century idyll,” until the family was forced to flee through Dresden as the Red Army advanced in 1945. Days later, Blobel witnessed the firebombing of the city from a nearby town where the family had taken shelter, and before the second world war ...
