Gunter Blobel

After the near-total destruction of Dresden in the Allied fire-bombing of February 1945, few people believed that its beauty would ever return. Dresden's slow but steady comeback was thus met with great relief.

In 1936, when I was born in the small Silesian village of Waltersdorf in the county of Sprottau in the then-eastern part of Germany, now part of Poland, the fine structure of the cell was still an enigma.

What do cells do when they see a broken piece of DNA? Cells don't like such breaks. They'll do pretty much anything they can to fix things up. If a chromosome is broken, the cells will repair the break using an intact chromosome.