An Award for Cell Biology

" This Is an Award for the Entire Field of Cell Biology. " This remark, made by Günter Blobel on American television after winning the 1999 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, was hardly uncharacteristic: the six-foot, snowy-haired Rocke-feller University professor was typically , generously, extending his prize to all of us who toil 'midst the microscopes. Perhaps more importantly, he was granting the relatively quiet field of cell biology its fifteen minutes of fame or, at least, national attention. As Blobel told his interviewer, even though this is the era of prime-time PCR and cloned sheep, it is the field of cell biology that is entering into another golden age. Although the ge-nomes of many different organisms have been, or are about to be, se-quenced, we remain largely unaware of how most proteins function. How they do so in the context of the cell, he maintained, is essential for understanding many human diseases. As the interview progressed, Blobel, like a medieval wizard, spoke as much with his hands as with his voice, conjuring images of cells and their compartments ; many in the TV audience surely went to bed that night with images of zip codes and mail carriers dancing in their heads. It is a further testament to his charm and eloquence that Blobel also managed to slip in an impassioned, persuasive plea for increasing federal funds for basic research. English, however, is not Blobel's native tongue. He was born 63 years ago in the small German farming town of Waltersdorf. This cosmopolitan figure, equally at ease donning a tuxedo as tossing balls to his beloved dogs, had never even glimpsed a city until he was eight years old. It was at the end of WWII in Germany, fleeing thesis from a common pool of ribo-somes, but secretory proteins start to translocate across the membrane of the endoplasmic reticulum as they are being made. Along with the rest of the Palade lab, Blobel began to concentrate on the question of what could be responsible for targeting these proteins. In 1971, together with Sabatini, Blobel proposed the " signal hypothesis , " the idea that secretory proteins are synthesized with an amino terminal extension that is recognized by a cytosolic factor and that, together, they are responsible for targeting to the endoplasmic reticulum. At the time, there was no experimental data to support the hypothesis. However, it allowed Blobel …