Photo: Paul Fetters

Thomas R. Cech, Ph.D.

Dr. Cech became president of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in January 2000. When he gave the 1995 Holiday Lectures on Science, he was an HHMI investigator, American Cancer Society Professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and professor of biochemistry, biophysics, and genetics at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center in Denver. He graduated from Grinnell College with a bachelor’s degree in chemistry and received his doctorate in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley. He conducted postdoctoral work in gene regulation at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In the 1980s, Dr. Cech and his colleagues at the University of Colorado at Boulder discovered that ribosomal RNA (rRNA) does more than form the protein-synthesizing machinery of the cell. They demonstrated that it can catalyze biochemical reactions—a function previously thought to be the exclusive domain of protein enzymes. This pioneering work earned Dr. Cech the 1989 Nobel Prize in chemistry (with Dr. Sidney Altman of Yale University). His current work focuses on the role of RNA in the replication of telomeres, DNA sequences at the ends of each chromosome in eukaryotic cells.

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