Gunter Blobel
Gunter Blobel was born on 21 st May 1936 in the Prussian province in Waltersdorf. This was a time when East Germany constantly experienced attacks from the red army. In January 1945, his family fled Lower Silesia. When peace was restored, Gunter attended school in Saxon, and then later studied medicine at the University of Tubingen in 1960. Two years later, he moved to Madison in Wisconsin after serving as an intern. Gunter later matriculated in a Ph.D. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology/Medicine in 1999 for his discovery of signal peptides. In 1967, and became a professor of Microbiology at the University of Wisconsin (Blobel, 2018). In 1999, he received a Nobel Prize in Physiology/medicine for discovery of signal peptides. In his youth, Gunter was a philanthropic fellow who founded the Friends of Dresden, where he donated his Nobel Award money for the rebuilding of the Frauenkirche and a synagogue. He even helped rebuild a church in the area he born in East Germany that had been destroyed during the war. Gunter died of cancer in New York in February 2018 at the age of 81 years
Gunter discovered that proteins of all living cells have virtual ZIP codes which act as guides to binding sites. This confers the proteins with a specificity of binding sites, which is an important aspect to explain the mechanism of action in Alzheimer’s disease, HIV, leukemia, and schizophrenia. This could be attributed to the fact that these diseases result due to loss of this specificity, such that the protein gets misplaced (Hood, 2018). During the transcription and translation process, there is coding, such that a specific code in the amino acid sequence of the protein determine its final destination. The special code is what directs the proteins on where to go. Gunter, therefore, opened a new field of study, which has formed a basis for scientists to study diseases that result from loss of the direction codes on proteins ( Pfeffer, 2017) .
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Randy Schekman
Randy Schekman was born in on 30 th December 1948 in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He went to Western High school in California, where in graduated in 1966. He later joined the University of California and received a bachelor’s degree in molecular sciences. In 1975, he got his Ph.D. at Stanford University, after which he joined the University of California as an associate professor and was later promoted to a professor in 1994. Randy had a special interest in DNA replication since pursuing his bachelor’s degree, and therefore took up a DNA research project for his Ph.D.
He has received several minor awards, but his outstanding work on the regulation mechanism of vesicle traffic saw him receive the Nobel Prize in 2013 in the physiology/medicine section. He worked together with James Rothman and Thomas Sudhof to study genes involved in protein transportation which include hormones and neurotransmitters (Alberts et al., 2015). They are all packaged in vesicles, which are site specific. They can only be delivered to their target site, and in the right quantity ( Lee et al., 2004). Randy, however, donated $400,000 of his noble prize money to aid in cancer research, as he has lost his mother and sister to it. In July 2014, he was also awarded the Schekman International Leadership Award for his great contribution to science. Keith has not yet given up his interest in science. He is currently involved in research in his laboratory at the University of California.
Elizabeth Blackburn
Elizabeth Helen Blackburn was born on 26 th November 1938 in Tasmania. She then attended Broadland House Church Of England and University High school where she passed and joined the University of Melbourne and attained her bachelors and masters degrees, all in science. She specialized in biochemistry and studied bacteriophages for her Ph.D. She further took a postdoctoral course in cellular and molecular biology, which fuelled her passion further.
It was this passion that led her to start a research on the protozoan Tetrahymena thermophile. From this research; she discovered that at the end of its chromosome, there was a repeating sequence of the bases TTGGGG (T for thiamine, G for guanine). It is out of this research that telomeres were discovered, together with the enzyme that fills in its terminals (telomerase). The enzyme has a reverse transcriptase activity, which ensures the chromosomes are complete (Greider & Blackburn 1987). It was also discovered that the repeating sequence was an aspect of evolution. This work, which was done together with Carol Greider, led her to attain the Nobel Prize in 2009 in the medicine/physiology category (Vogel & Pennisi, 2009).
Blackburn has not left the world of science. She is an emeritus professor of Biology and Physiology, in the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the University of California. She is a leader in the study of telomeres, and currently, together with colleagues, she has been investigating the effect of stress on telomeres and the enzyme telomerase. This research so far has associated chronic stress with early onset of aging signs. This is because stress shortens the length of telomeres, which leads to deterioration of health (Epel et al., 2004).
References
Alberts, B., Cicerone, R. J., Fienberg, S. E., Kamb, A., McNutt, M., Nerem, R. M., & Zuber, M. T. (2015). Self-correction in science at work. Science , 348 (6242), 1420-1422.
Blobel, G. (2018). Günter Blobel: Pioneer of molecular cell biology (1936–2018). The Journal of cell biology , 217 (4), 1163.
Epel, E. S., Blackburn, E. H., Lin, J., Dhabhar, F. S., Adler, N. E., Morrow, J. D., & Cawthon, R. M. (2004). Accelerated telomere shortening in response to life stress. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , 101 (49), 17312-17315.
Greider, C. W., & Blackburn, E. H. (1987). The telomere terminal transferase of Tetrahymena is a ribonucleoprotein enzyme with two kinds of primer specificity. Cell , 51 (6), 887-898.
Hood, L. (2018). Trailblazing Technologies. Innovative Research in Life Sciences: Pathways to Scientific Impact, Public Health Improvement, and Economic Progress , 243.
Lee, M. C., Miller, E. A., Goldberg, J., Orci, L., & Schekman, R. (2004). Bi-directional protein transport between the ER and Golgi. Annu. Rev. Cell Dev. Biol. , 20 , 87-123.
Pfeffer, S. R. (2017). NPC1-mediated cholesterol export from lysosomes. The FASEB Journal , 31 (1_supplement), 948-1.
The prize, N. (2015). The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2015. Press Release: Stockholm,19(1)
Vogel, G., & Pennisi, E. (2009). US Researchers recognized for work on telomeres.
