Nobel laureate who donated prize to rebuild Dresden synagogue and church dies
Günter Blobel, 81, witnessed Allied firebombing of Dresden as a child and gave $960,000 to city
A German Nobel laureate who donated his prize money to rebuild a synagogue and a church in the German city of Dresden died on Sunday at the age of 81.
Günter Blobel, who was reportedly raised Lutheran, won the 1999 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
In 1994, he founded the “Friends of Dresden” to which he donated his almost $1 million prize money. That money was used to build the New Synagogue, built on the same site as the Semper Synagogue, which had been destroyed in 1938 during the Nazi German pogrom known as Kristallnacht or the Night of the Broken Glass, and the Frauenkirche, a baroque Lutheran church destroyed in 1945.
He had witnessed the Allied Forces firebombing of Dresden as a child in early 1945.
“It was one of the great pleasures of my life to donate the entire sum of the Nobel Prize, in memory of my sister Ruth Blobel, to the restoration of Dresden,” Blobel said at the time of his award, Time reported.
The New York Times reported that the destruction of Dresden was an image that remained with Blobel throughout his life.
“I saw the firebombing destruction of Dresden from very near,” Blobel told the paper, “only a few kilometers away; for an 8 1/2-year-old, this was all very impressive. The bombing was so bright that you could read the newspaper by the red sky.”
https://youtu.be/aKyEFk1ZRW0
Blobel, who was on the faculty of the Rockefeller University since 1968, won his Nobel Prize for his discovery of signal peptides, which act as cellular ZIP codes, directing proteins to specific locations within cells.
“Generations of scientists have built upon his seminal findings, with impact on the understanding of a wide range of human diseases as well as for the industrial production of proteins, including many life-saving drugs such as insulin and therapeutic antibodies,” said Michael Young, recipient of the 2017 Nobel Prize in Medicine.
