Günter Blobel: cell biologist who donated his Nobel prize money to the city of Dresden
BMJ 2018; 360 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.k1394 (Published 26 March 2018) Cite this as: BMJ 2018;360:k1394
- Ned Stafford
- Hamburg, Germany
- ns{at}europefn.de
Credit: Rockefeller University
In the final months of the second world war, 8 year old Günter Blobel and his German family passed through Dresden while fleeing the advancing Soviet Red Army. Young Günter fell in love with the beauty of the city, especially the majestic Frauenkirche (Church of our Lady). A few days later—on the evening of 13 February 1945—American and British planes began a massive bombing attack that lasted two nights and ignited a raging inferno.
By then, Günter and his family were safe with relatives outside Dresden. They observed the carnage, which killed thousands of civilians and destroyed much of the city, including the Frauenkirche.
“The fire was so bright that night that one could read a newspaper from the light, although we were many kilometres away,” Blobel recalled more than half a century later. “After the war ended, we passed through Dresden twice, and I saw the incredible destruction. I said at the time, ‘If there ever is a chance I can do something to resurrect this whole thing, I will.’”1
Nobel prize
The chance to do something came 54 years later, at 5 am on 11 October 1999, when Blobel was woken up at his home in New York City by a telephone call from Stockholm, Sweden. Blobel, by then a globally renowned medical researcher, was informed that he had been awarded the 1999 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine for “the discovery that proteins have intrinsic signals that govern their transport and localisation in the cell.”2
The prize carried an award of $960 000, which Blobel donated to Dresden, while at the same time honouring his “beautiful oldest sister, Ruth,” who, at age 19, died in the final days of the war when her train was bombed by Allied planes. “It was one of the great pleasures of my …