It's Stockholm Calling. Oslo Too

The human cell is a marvel, not just of engineering but also of traffic control. Proteins are constantly shuttling within it to build and repair substructures, process energy and carry out the myriad functions that keep this basic unit of life alive.

Until the 1970s, though, it was unclear how the proteins knew where to go. Guenter Blobel, a German-born cell and molecular biologist at New York City's Rockefeller University, figured it out--and for solving that mystery, the 63-year-old naturalized American last week won the 1999 Nobel Prize in Medicine.

It was in 1971 that Blobel and a colleague proposed that each protein comes with a built-in chemical signal--a kind of "ZIP code"--that tells it where it should go. Soon Blobel and his research team identified just such a "signal peptide"; and since then, he and his team have shown that signal peptides are found in just about all plants and animals.

The discovery has a multitude of practical implications. Cystic fibrosis, for example, and some forms of kidney disease are caused by the failure of key proteins to get where they ought to be. Understanding the details of such failures could probably lead to powerful treatments. Indeed, Blobel's research has already helped scientists use tiny cellular "factories" to mass-produce proteins such as erythropoietin, which stimulates red-blood-cell production. A deeper understanding of cellular machinery, which Blobel continues to pursue, could eventually show how cells are damaged in Alzheimer's disease, cancer and infections.

A lover of architecture who witnessed the fire bombing of Dresden as a boy during World War II, Blobel is donating much of his $960,000 in prize money to the restoration of a church and a synagogue in that city and of a historic building in Furbine, Italy.

--By Michael D. Lemonick