Thomas cech nobel lecture
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Thomas (Tom) Cech was born in Chicago and grew up in Iowa City. His father was an M.D. and his mother was a homemaker. As a child, Cech collected rocks and minerals and would "talk" science with his father and professors at the University of Iowa. Throughout high school, Cech was more interested in academics than sports.
In 1966, Cech went to Grinnell College to study chemistry - a subject he really enjoyed. College was a real eye-opener as he met others who were just as excited about academics as he was. He would have stayed in chemistry, but as an undergraduate, Cech worked at Argonne National Laboratory and at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. These research experiences made him realize that it just took too long to gather meaningful data for a chemistry experiment.
In 1970, Cech headed for the University of California at Berkeley for graduate work. Here he discovered the world of molecular biology. As he says, he "was thrilled with the much more rapid interplay between idea and experimental test that was possible in this field," and he "became committe
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Thomas Cech
Thomas Robert Cech (born December 8, 1947 in Chicago) is an Americanchemist who shared the 1989 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Sidney Altman. They discovered that RNA was a catalyst. Cech discovered that RNA could itself cut strands of RNA, which showed that life could have started as RNA.[1]
Career
[change | change source]Cech also studied telomeres, and his lab discovered an enzyme, TERT (telomerase reverse transcriptase), which helps to restore telomeres after they are shortened during cell division.[2]
As president of Howard Hughes Medical Institute, he promoted science education, and he teaches an undergraduate chemistry course at the University of Colorado.
He was elected a foreign member of the Academia Europaea in 1999.[3]
Research
[change | change source]Cech's main research area is transcription in the nucleus of cells. He studies how the genetic code of DNA is transcribed into RNA. In the 1970s, Cech discovered that an unprocessed RNA molecule could splice itself.
In 1982, Cech became the first to show that RNA
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Thomas R. Cech, PhD
Distinguished Professor, Director Biofrontiers Institute, University of Colorado at Boulder,
Former President of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute
Nobel Laureate Tom Cech has been on the faculty of the University of Colorado Boulder since 1978. In 2000, he was named president of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and remained in the position until 2009. Currently his lab in Boulder investigates the structure and replication of telomeric DNA. A telomere protects the end of a chromosome from degenerating or fusing with another chromosome.
Says Cech of the Linda Crnic Institute for Down Syndrome, “The entire mission of the Linda Crnic Institute is important, but I am most involved with the research efforts. Further research of the genes expressed on chromosome 21 will lead to better understanding of Down syndrome, and this better understanding will pave the way to intervention to eliminate its ill effects.”
After receiving his PhD at Berkeley, Cech expanded his knowledge of biology with a postdoctoral fellowship in the lab of Mary Lou Pardue at the Ma
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