This remark, made by Günter Blobel on American television after winning the 1999 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, was hardly uncharacteristic: the six-foot, snowy-haired Rockefeller University professor was typically, generously, extending his prize to all of us who toil 'midst the microscopes.
Perhaps more importantly, he was granting the relatively quiet field of cell biology its fifteen minutes of fame or, at least, national attention. As Blobel told his interviewer, even though this is the era of prime-time PCR and cloned sheep, it is the field of cell biology that is entering into another golden age. Although the genomes of many different organisms have been, or are about to be, sequenced, we remain largely unaware of how most proteins function. How they do so in the context of the cell, he maintained, is essential for understanding many human...
