VOLUME 12, NUMBER 16 • FEBRUARY 23, 2001

Blobel to Give Friday Lecture on March 2

Cell biologist Günter Blobel will give the Friday lecture on March 2. Blobel, the John D. Rockefeller Jr. Professor at The Rockefeller University and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, studies the process by which newly made proteins are transported across the membranes of cell structures called organelles.

Because the accurate distribution of proteins to their proper places in the cell is necessary for a cell to function, these findings have an immediate bearing on many diseases, including cystic fibrosis, Alzheimer’s disease and AIDS. Blobel was awarded the 1999 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery that proteins have intrinsic signals that govern their transport and localization in the cell.

An average cell possesses about a billion protein molecules that exist in thousands of types and constantly need replacement. Making proteins and shipping them to appropriate destinations, such as the cell’s internal organelles, is a vital activity in cells. Proteins are manufactured by cellular structures called ribosomes. Pioneering research by Blobel and his associates revealed how proteins are transported from ribosomes and integrated into other organelles or transported out of the cell.

Nobel laureate Günter Blobel is the John D. Rockefeller Jr. Professor at The Rockefeller University. He is also an HHMIinvestigator.

Work in Blobel’s laboratory revealed the existence of a ZIP code system in the cell. Each newly made protein has an organelle-specific address, a stretch of the protein referred to as a signal sequence that is recognized by receptors on an organelle’s surface. Blobel and his colleagues also showed that, for at least one organelle called the endoplasmic reticulum, the binding of the signal sequence to its receptor opens a watery channel in the membrane through which the protein can travel.

Current research in Blobel’s laboratory also explores the movement of proteins across nuclear pore complexes (NPCs), huge protein units suspended in the circular openings within the membrane envelope surrounding a cell’s nucleus. NPCs can accommodate the passage of large molecular assemblies, such as RNA or DNA bound to proteins. Each NPC mediates as many as 10 import and 10 export events per second.

Blobel was born in Waltersdorf, Germany, on May 21, 1936. He received his medical degree in 1960 from the University of Tübingen and a doctoral degree in oncology in 1967 from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where he worked with Van R. Potter, Ph.D., in the McArdle Laboratory for Cancer Research.

He joined The Rockefeller University in 1967 as a postdoctoral fellow in the cell biology laboratory of Professor Emeritus Philip Siekevitz, Ph.D., and Nobel laureate George Palade, M.D. Blobel was appointed an assistant professor in 1969, associate professor in 1973, professor in 1976 and John D. Rockefeller Jr. Professor in 1992. He received a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) appointment in 1986 when HHMI established a unit at The Rockefeller University.

In addition to a 1993 Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award, Blobel received the Mayor’s Award for Excellence in Science and Technology in 1997, the King Faisal Award in 1996, the Ciba Drew Award in Biomedical Research in 1995, the National Academy of Sciences’ 1978 U.S. Steel Foundation Award in Molecular Biology and a 1982 Gairdner Foundation International Award. He became a member of the Leopoldina and was elected to membership in the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 1983, the year he received the Academy’s Richard Lounsbery Award, for work in "uncovering the molecular interactions that control the traffic of newly synthesized proteins in eukaryotic cells; for his incisive experiments; and for the beauty of the findings."

Blobel also has received the 1983 Warburg Medal, the highest award of the German Biochemical Society; the V. D. Mattia Award of the Roche Institute of Molecular Biology; the E. B. Wilson Award from the American Society for Cell Biology; Columbia University’s Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize; the Waterford Bio-Medical Science Award; and the Max-Planck Forschungspreis. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, associate member of the European Molecular Biology Organization, a member of the American Philosophical Society and an honorary member of the German Society of Cell Biology and of the Japanese Biochemical Society. He served as president of the American Society for Cell Biology in 1990