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Thomas (Tom) Cech was born in Chicago and grew up in Iowa City.

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Thomas (Tom) Cech was born in Chicago and grew up in Iowa City. His father was an M.D. and his mother was a homemaker. As a child, Cech collected rocks and minerals and would "talk" science with his father and professors at the University of Iowa. Throughout high school, Cech was more interested in academics than sports.

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 committe

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Concept 26 RNA was the first genetic molecule.

Stanley Miller and Harold Urey demonstrated that organic molecules can be synthesized under prebiotic conditions. Thomas Cech and Sidney Altman discovered that RNA can have enzymatic activities. For this discovery, they shared the 1989 Nobel Prize for Chemistry.

Thomas Robert Cech (1947-)

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Thomas Cech

American biochemist

Thomas Robert Cech (born December 8, 1947) is an American chemist who shared the 1989 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Sidney Altman for their discovery of the catalytic properties of RNA. Cech discovered that RNA could itself cut strands of RNA, suggesting that life might have started as RNA.^[1] He found that RNA can not only transmit instructions, but that it can act as a speed up the necessary reactions.^[2]

He also studied telomeres, and his lab discovered an enzyme, TERT (telomerase reverse transcriptase), which is part of the process of restoring telomeres after they are shortened during cell division.^[3]

As president of Howard Hughes Medical Institute, he promoted science education, and he teaches an undergraduate chemistry course at the University of Colorado.

Early life and career

Cech was born to parents of Czech origin (his grandfather was Czech, his other grandparents were first-generation Americans) in Chicago. He grew up in Iowa City, Iowa. In junior high school, he knocked on the doors of g