Günter Blobel

Günter Blobel (21 May 1936 to 18 February 2018) was a Silesian German and American biologist who received the 1999 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering that proteins carry intrinsic signals that govern their transport and localization in the cell. He was born in Waltersdorf in the Prussian Province of Lower Silesia, then in eastern Germany. In January 1945 his family fled to Dresden to escape the advancing Red Army, and after the war he attended gymnasium in the Saxon town of Freiberg. He studied medicine and graduated from the University of Tübingen in 1960, then moved to Madison, Wisconsin, where he worked in the laboratory of Van R. Potter and matriculated with a Ph.D. in 1967. He then moved to Rockefeller University as a postdoctoral fellow with George Palade, was soon appointed a professor, and worked there in New York City from 1968. He lived on Manhattan's Upper East Side with his wife, Laura Maioglio, the owner of the restaurant Barbetta.