A native of Germany, Günter Blobel received his MD from the University of Tübingen in 1960 and his PhD in 1967 from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He did postdoctoral work at Rockefeller University. He was named the John D. Rockefeller Jr. Professor in 1992 and became an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in 1986. Blobel was the 1999 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discovery that proteins have intrinsic signals that govern their transport and localization in the cell. He also received the King Faisal Award in 1996, the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research in 1993, the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize in 1989 and the Gairdner Foundation International Award in 1982. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, American Philosophical Society, and Pontifical Academy of Sciences.