Gunter Blobel

Günter Blobel (Waltersdorf, Silesia, Germany, May 21, 1936 – New York, February 18, 2018) was a German-American biologist.

Biography

Günter Blobel was born in Waltersdorf in the Prussian province of Lower Silesia, then located in eastern Germany. In January 1945, his family fled from his native Silesia to Dresden to escape the advancing Red Army. During the bombing of Dresden Blobel, then 8 years old, stayed with his family on a relative's farm west of the city. After the war, Blobel attended the gymnasium in the Saxon city of Freiberg. He studied medicine and graduated from the University of Tübingen in 1960. After two years of service in a medical internship, he moved to Madison, Wisconsin, following an older brother, enrolled in the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and joined the Van R. Potter's laboratory for his graduate work.

In 1987, he became a US citizen.

In 1967 he graduated in Oncology, he spent his entire career at Rockefeller University in New York, where he was a professor and in whose cell biology laboratory (at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute) he worked.

He won the 1999 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work in the 1970s, discovering that proteins have intrinsic signals that govern their transport and location in the cell. These investigations opened the way to create drugs that target the place in the body where they should act. He donated the entire prize to the city of Dresden. & # 34; I attended the destruction of Dresden very closely, and nothing else has impressed me more, & # 34;, he commented when he made the donation.

Philanthropy

Blobel became known for his direct and active support of the rebuilding of Dresden in Germany, becoming, in 1994, the founder and president of the non-profit organization "Friends of Dresden, Inc. " He donated all the money from the Nobel prize to the restoration of Dresden, in particular for the reconstruction of the Frauenkirche (completed in 2005) and the construction of a new synagogue. In Leipzig, he sought the reconstruction of the Paulinerkirche the university church of the University of Leipzig that had been destroyed by the East German communist regime in 1968, arguing that "this is a sanctuary of German cultural history, connected to the greatest names in German cultural history ".

Academies and associations to which he belonged

• Member of the National Academy of Sciences
• Member of the American Philosophical Society
• Member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences
• Member of the German Order pour le Mérite

Awards and recognitions

• Canada Gairdner International Prize (1982).
• Louisa Gross Horwitz Award (1989).
• Albert Lasker Award in Basic Medical Research (1993).
• King Faisal Award (1996).
• Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (1999).