UW doctoral recipient wins Nobel Prize

A university professor who was advisor to Nobel Prize winning cell biologist Günter Blobel while he studied oncology here says he’s not surprised the one-time doctoral candidate has received the international honor.

See also: Past UW–Madison Nobelists

“This has been building for the last 10 years at least,” says professor Van R. Potter of the McArdle Lab for Cancer Research. “His name has come up before. It’s not a surprise at all.”

Blobel received a doctoral degree in oncology in 1967 from UW -Madison, where he worked with Potter in the McArdle Lab. Blobel was in Madison from 1962-1967.

“I remark with a wink that he’s the first of my students to get a Nobel prize, but there are several out there who deserve it,” Potter says. “There have been some very outstanding people who have gone through here, and we’re proud of Blobel because he came from here.”

While in Madison, Blobel’s research interest was in methods for separating cells into their different components. He eventually came to study what he called “protein traffic,” how proteins migrate from one part of the cell to another carrying specific messages. In particular, he had an interest in the protein-mediated exchange of information between the cell’s nucleus and cytoplasm.

“There is protein traffic in the body,” Potter explains, citing the pituitary gland’s ability to secrete regulatory proteins. “But he studied protein traffic inside the cell.”

Blobel impressed Potter as being a far more serious student than many graduate students as Blobel already had earned his medical degree by the time he arrived in Madison.

“He already had an M.D. when he got here in 1962, and he was an outstanding student. I respected him very much for choosing to take the long-term view and get a Ph.D the hard way — to take the tough courses like physical and organic chemistry and spend the time here doing research.”

“This is an indirect honor for McArdle and the university, given that he (Blobel) is no longer here. But let us not forget Howard Temin, who stayed here and won the Nobel Prize while he was still teaching students,” Potter says.

Blobel was born in Waltersdorf, Germany, on May 21, 1936. He received his medical degree in 1960 from the University of Tübingen. Today he is John D. Rockefeller Jr. Professor at The Rockefeller University and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator.

He studies the process by which newly made proteins are transported across the membranes of cell structures called organelles. Because the accurate distribution of proteins to their proper places in the cell is necessary for a cell to function, these findings have an immediate bearing on many diseases, including cystic fibrosis, Alzheimer’s and AIDS.

Pioneering research by Blobel and his associates revealed how proteins are transported from ribosomes and integrated into other organelles or transported out of the cell.

Work in Blobel’s laboratory revealed the existence of a zip code system in the cell. Each newly made protein has an organelle-specific address, a stretch of the protein referred to as a signal sequence that is recognized by receptors on an organelle1s surface. Blobel and his colleagues also showed that, for at least one organelle called the endoplasmic reticulum, the binding of the signal sequence to its receptor opens a watery channel in the membrane through which the protein can travel.

Blobel now works on identifying similar channels in other organelles.