Joan Steitz gives high priority to teaching undergraduates and mentoring graduate students.

HHMI investigator Jennifer A. Doudna, who was a junior faculty member in Steitz's department at Yale and is now at the University of California–Berkeley, recalls numerous times when Steitz "called a spade a spade"—times when it might have been easier to let things pass. "If a faculty member wasn't being treated fairly, Joan spoke up in a way that I really respected," says Doudna.

Steitz has made it a priority to give the next generation something she didn't have: a female network within the system.

Both Baserga and Doudna are vigorous in their praise of Steitz as a scientist, but it is with particular gratitude that they cite her mentorship in teaching them how to navigate the system and the ins and outs of starting one's own lab. For her part, Steitz recalls what it was like not to have other women around in her early days as a scientist—lonely. So she has made it a priority to give the Basergas and Doudnas of the next generation something she didn't have: a female network within the system.

Steitz characterizes her relationship with RNA as a "personal romance" that dates back to her time in Watson's lab and her initial work on bacteriophage RNA. But her first major leap forward in RNA science came during her postdoctoral years overseas. After finishing at Harvard, the newly married Steitz traveled with her husband, Tom Steitz (also an HHMI investigator at Yale), to Cambridge, England. There, in the division run by two more renowned scientists, Francis Crick and Sydney Brenner, she focused her research on determining the exact point on a strand of messenger RNA (mRNA) that binds a bacterial ribosome to begin the manufacture of a protein. (A ribosome is the machine that does protein synthesis in the cell.) Success came in 1969 when she published a paper in Nature showing the nucleotide sequences in bacteriophage mRNA that act as such starting points.

She continued her work on bacterial and bacteriophage RNA upon her return to the United States in 1970, when she joined the Yale faculty as an assistant professor of molecular biophysics and biochemisty (her husband also took a position at Yale). By 1975, her efforts were further rewarded when she published how ribosomes identify the start site on a strand of mRNA: by complementary base pairing.

That discovery remains a highlight of her career—in fact, it tops the list, she says. But she rebuffs a request to rank past accomplishments, preferring to talk about what's currently underway. It's clear this energetic woman would rather get on with her research than rehash "such ancient history." Her cramped office—piled with papers and stacks of books everywhere—is a bit mazelike. She apologizes for the mess, but in pro forma fashion that says come back next year and it'll look the same.

Dozens of empty champagne bottles line a top office shelf, remnants of an honored lab ritual. Each is savored and signed by a student who has successfully completed a thesis. Steitz has a particular smile that flickers beneath her rosy, yet elegant cheekbones when talking about or with her students. It's something her students notice and appreciate. The smile plays there as a message of encouragement, endorsing their right to think aloud even as they sometimes fumble with their biological formulations.

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