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 to be revised.”

The finding means that RNA not only carries genetic information but also actively helps direct cellular biochemistry. Also, RNA enzymes (ribozymes, a type of catalyst), have the ability to destroy viral RNAs under certain conditions, meaning that Cech’s work may help inactivate viruses in animals and people.

Cech received his doctorate in 1970 from the University of California at Berkeley, and completed post-doctoral work at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass.

He founded The Cech Laboratory at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and also works with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Chevy Chase, Md.

His other awards include the Heineken Prize of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences, the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award and the National Medal of Science.

He has also been elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and awarded a lifetime professorship by the American Cancer Society.

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