Blobel graduated from the University of Tübingen’s medical school in 1960 and, at the suggestion of his oldest brother, a veterinarian on the faculty of the University of Wisconsin, completed his education in the United States. He received a doctorate in oncology from Wisconsin in 1967 and subsequently joined Rockefeller University on a research fellowship. Beginning in 1986, he also worked as an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, a medical research organization based in Chevy Chase, Md.