Günter Blobel
Scientist who won a Nobel Prize for work on signal peptides and used the money to help rebuild Dresden
GÜNTER BLOBEL, who has died aged 81, won the 1999 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for research that shed new light on diseases including cystic fibrosis.
He; he promptly announced that he would be donating the $960,000 prize money to help pay for the restoration of Dresden’s Frauenkirche church, which had been destroyed by Allied bombing in 1945, as well as to fund a replacement for the city’s synagogue, destroyed on Kristallnacht in 1938.
Blobel was awarded the Nobel Prize for the discovery of “signal peptides”, sequences of amino acids which occur in newly-made proteins, which act as “zip codes” (postcodes) telling a cell where a protein should go. A typical mammalian cell contains about a billion protein molecules. Some are essential for the machinery inside the cell, but many – for example, digestive enzymes that help break down food – work outside the cell. The proteins are continually being destroyed and replaced, so newly made proteins must find their way to their proper positions.
Blobel showed how a protein’s signal peptide determines whether it will end up in a specific compartment of a cell, lodge in the cell wall or be exported from the cell. He went on to show that if, due to errors in the signalling, proteins fail to reach their proper positions, they can cause a range of diseases, including some forms of inherited high cholesterol and illnesses such as cystic fibrosis.
Blobel’s discovery has had an immense impact on modern cell biological research and laid the basis for using biotechnology to produce drugs such as insulin, growth hormone and certain chemicals used in chemotherapy.
One of six children of a veterinarian, Günter Blobel was born on May 21 1936 in the Silesian village of Waltersdorf in what was then the eastern part of Germany (now part of Poland). He described his early childhood as a “perfect 19th century idyll”, with hour-long rides on winter Sundays in horse-drawn sleighs to his grandparents’ 18th century manor house.
In January 1945, however, the family had to flee from the advancing Red Army and moved to stay with relatives west of Dresden in Saxony. On the way, they drove through the city – an unforgettable experience for the eight-year old boy: “Its many spires and the magnificent cupola of the Frauenkirche were a magnificent sight even for the untrained eye of a child. Driving through Dresden, I still remember the many palaces, happily decorated with cherubs and other symbols of the baroque era.”
Only a few days later, the family saw, from a distance of about 30 kilometres, the sky turn red as the city was engulfed in a firestorm caused by Allied bombing. The magnificent baroque church was reduced to a pile of stones and Blobel recalled walking through the city’s streets, stepping around the rubble: “I decided that if I ever could help to do something with the city, I would.”
The months before and after the end of the war were chaotic for the Blobels, and in April 1945 Günter’s 19-year-old sister Ruth was killed in an air raid in Bavaria and buried in a mass grave.
After the war, his father re-established his veterinary practice in the medieval Saxon town of Freiberg, but the family found itself at odds with the new communist authorities in East Germany. Günter was told he could not study at university because he was a “capitalist”.
Fortunately it was still possible to travel freely to West Germany, so in 1954 he moved to Frankfurt where he enrolled at the university to study Medicine. The rest of the family soon followed.
He graduated from the University of Tübingen in 1960 but, deciding that he was more interested in research than clinical practice, he secured a graduate fellowship to study for a PHD in oncology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. In 1966 he joined George Palade’s laboratory of cell biology at the Rockefeller University (formerly the Rockefeller Institute), where he carried out his groundbreaking work on cell proteins in the 1970s and continued to work until his retirement. He became an American citizen in 1980 and was appointed to the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in 1986.
In 1994, after the end of communism in eastern Europe, he founded the Friends of Dresden to raise money in the US to help rebuild the Frauenkirche. The new Dresden synagogue was completed in 2001. The rebuilding of the Frauenkirche was completed in 2005.
In 1976 Blobel married Laura Maioglio, the owner of Barbetta, a celebrated Manhattan restaurant which had been founded by her father in 1906. She survives him. There were no children of the marriage.
Günter Blobel, born May 21 1936, died February 18 2018