Thomas R. Cech, PhD, Nobel Laureate and Distinguished Professor of Biochemistry, University of Colorado Boulder will give the IGB Distinguished Public Lecture in Genomics "The Magic of RNA: New Medicines, Immortality, and the Power to Control Evolution" at 3:30 p.m. on April 1st, 2025 at the I Hotel & Illinois Conference Center.

Thomas Cech was born in Chicago and grew up in Iowa City. As a child, Cech collected rocks and minerals and would "talk" science with his father and professors at the University of Iowa. 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 committed to the interface between molecular biology and chemistry." Cech finished his PhD thesis on DNA chromosome structure and then went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for post doctoral work.

After his PhD in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley and postdoctoral research at MIT, Dr. Cech joined the faculty of the University of Colorado Boulder in 1978. In 1982 Dr. Cech and his research group announced that an RNA molecule from Tetrahymena, a single-celled pond organism, cut and rejoined chemical bonds in the complete absence of proteins. This discovery of self-splicing RNA provided the first exception to the long-held belief that biological reactions are always catalyzed by proteins. In addition, it has been heralded as providing a new, plausible scenario for the origin of life; because RNA can be both an information-carrying molecule and a catalyst, perhaps the first self-reproducing system consisted of RNA alone. For this work, Cech shared the 1989 Nobel Prize for Chemistry with Sidney Altman.

Dr. Cech became a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator in 1988 and Distinguished Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry in 1990. From 2000-2009, he served as president of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the largest private biomedical research organization in the U.S.A. He then returned to full-time research and teaching at the University of Colorado Boulder, also serving as the founding director of the university’s BioFrontiers Institute. Dr. Cech’s work has been recognized by many national and international awards and prizes, including the Heineken Prize of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences (1988), the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award (1988), the Nobel Prize in Chemistry (1989), and the National Medal of Science (1995). Dr. Cech has been elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (1987) and National Academy of Medicine (2000) and is a lifetime professor of the American Cancer Society.

Full event details are available here.