| 1 | Name: | Dr. Günter Blobel | |
| Institution: | Howard Hughes Medical Institute & Rockefeller University | ||
| Year Elected: | 1989 | ||
| Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | ||
| Subdivision: | 202. Cellular and Developmental Biology | ||
| Residency: | Resident | ||
| Living? : | Deceased | ||
| Birth Date: | 1936 | ||
| Death Date: | February 18, 2018 | ||
German-born cell biologist Günter Blobel was known for communicating difficult concepts in a clear and interesting way. He contributed pioneering work that shed light on diseases such as cystic fibrosis, Alzheimer's and AIDS and provided the basis for bioengineered drugs such as insulin. In 1999 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for his discovery that proteins have signals that govern their movement and position in the cell. Each protein, he found, has its own "zip code" that determines whether the protein is transported across or integrated into a specific cellular membrane. Dr. Blobel received his medical degree from the University of Tübingen in Germany in 1960, earned a doctorate in oncology from the University of Wisconsin in 1967 and became a postdoctoral fellow at the Rockefeller University protein laboratory, where he had been a professor since 1976. A member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the American Society for Cell Biology, he had also been an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute since 1986. Dr. Blobel died on February 18, 2018, at the age of 81 in New York City. | |||