Milestones Icon: Tom Cech

One of the University of Colorado’s great minds, Tom Cech, has been teaching in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry in Boulder since 1978, where he is a distinguished professor.

His greatest achievement has been winning the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1989, an honor he shared with Sidney Altman. The two men discovered that RNA (ribonucleic acid) in living cells is not only a molecule of heredity but also can function as a biocatalyst. The discovery concerns fundamental aspects of the molecular basis of life, and, according to the Nobel Foundation’s 1989 press release, “many chapters in our textbooks have…