When Thomas Edison died, or Einstein, or Dr. Feynman, for that matter… we knew what we had lost. The scientific community grieved. But when a scientist whose discovery might prove to be in any one or even all of their leagues died on Feb. 18 of last year, it felt as though the news went almost unnoticed. Gunter Blobel was a molecular biologist. In 1999, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine. He had determined that proteins in any living cell have a sort of ZIP code system that guides them to where they need to go to take… Read More
When Thomas Edison died, or Einstein, or Dr. Feynman, for that matter… we knew what we had lost. The scientific community grieved. But when a scientist whose discovery might prove to be in any one or even all of their leagues died on Feb. 18 of last year, it felt as though the news went almost unnoticed. Gunter Blobel was a molecular biologist. In 1999, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine. He had determined that proteins in any living cell have a sort of ZIP code system that guides them to where they need to go to take care of tissue, organs, and biochemistry. Blobel’s mentor at Rockefeller University, Dr. George Palade, was a wizard with electron microscopes — his work earned him the Nobel in 1974. Blobel figured out that there are about a quadrillion cells in the human body, each containing about a billion protein molecules that are spun out of little cavities known as endoplasmic reticula. These proteins are all guarded by special membranes. He and a colleague hypothesized that each of these proteins also contains proteins that act as airport luggage tags, as his obituary in the Times put it. It turns out this… Read More