Thomas Cech

Thomas Cech is the current President of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Mr Cech has been an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute since 1988 and a member of the faculty at the University of Colorado in Boulder since 1978. He is also a professor of biochemistry, biophysics and genetics at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center in Denver . He attended Grinnell College as an undergraduate and earned his doctorate in chemistry at the University of California , Berkeley , where he studied under John E. Hearst. As a postdoctoral fellow, he worked in the laboratory of Mary-Lou Pardue at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Cech's wife, Carol, is also a biochemist. They met at Grinnell and attended graduate school together at Berkeley , where she earned her doctorate; she did her postdoctoral work at Harvard University . The Cechs have two daughters.
Cech shared the Nobel Prize in chemistry with Sidney Altman of Yale University for work that each had done independently. In announcing the awards, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said that they had been selected "for their discovery that RNA (ribonucleic acid) in living cells is not only a molecule of heredity but also can function as a biocatalyst. This discovery, which came as a complete surprise to scientists, concerns fundamental aspects of the molecular basis of life. Many chapters in our textbooks have [had] to be revised."

Cech is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has received numerous prizes and awards, including the Pfizer Award in Enzyme Chemistry, the Award in Molecular Biology (National Academy of Sciences), the Heineken Prize (Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences), the Lasker Award and the National Medal of Science, which was presented to him by President Clinton at a White House ceremony in 1995. He has received honorary doctorates from Grinnell College and the University of Chicago .