Günter Blobel (1936–2018)

When Günter Blobel died on February 18, the world lost an innovative thinker and superb experimentalist who ushered cell biology into the molecular age. He left new paradigms that continue to inform our understanding of how cells work, a legion of trainees who continue to transform science, and a legacy of accomplishments as a global citizen. Debonair and jovial, he had a ferocious passion for science as well as opera and architecture. Blobel was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1999 ‘‘for the discovery that proteins have intrinsic signals that govern their transport and localization in the cell.’’ In themid-20 century, cell biology was undergoing a revolution. Elegant morphological and biochemical assays were characterizing cellular architecture, and a cataloging of ‘‘what was where’’ had identified the subcellular compartments, their contents, and their functions. Blobel’s demonstration of discrete ‘‘topogenic sequences’’ in proteins that governed where they were in the cell, how they got there, and how they were folded provided the first mechanistic insight into how this architecture