Günter Blobel

Born: 1936

Scientist and Philanthropist

Günter Blobel was born in Waltersdorf, Silesia, then a part of eastern Germany that now belongs to Poland. He studied medicine in Tübingen in southwestern Germany and finished his Ph.D. in Oncology in 1967 at the University of Wisconsin. Dr. Blobel became a professor at the Rockefeller University in New York City in 1976, focusing on cellular and molecular biology. He also became a U.S. citizen.

Since 1994, Dr. Blobel has been a member of the National Academy of Science. And, in 1999, he was honored with the Nobel Prize of Medicine for his discovery that proteins in cells have signals that determine their movements. With the help of Blobel’s discoveries, process can be made in the research of hereditary diseases such as cystic fibrosis, Alzheimers and certain types of cancer.

As a child, Dr. Blobel had witnessed the 1945 fire raid on Dresden and the subsequent burning of the city and the beautiful Church of Our Lady (the Frauenkirche). In 1994, he helped to found the Friends of Dresden, a charitable organization, with the goal to raise funds in the U.S. to help rebuild the Frauenkirche in Dresden as well as many historic monuments and buildings in Dresden. He donated the entire amount of his Nobel Prize monies, in memory of his sister Ruth Blobel, to the restoration of Dresden, to the rebuilding of the Frauenkirche and the building of a new synagogue.

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