Thomas R. Cech
Facts
Photo from the Nobel Foundation archive.
Thomas R. Cech
Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1989
Born: 8 December 1947, Chicago, IL, USA
Affiliation at the time of the award: University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA
Prize motivation: “for their discovery of catalytic properties of RNA”
Prize share: 1/2
Work
Enzymes are substances that speed up the chemical processes in organisms' cells without being consumed. It was long thought that all enzymes were proteins. Sidney Altman and Thomas Cech demonstrated that RNA can also function as an enzyme. In 1982, Cech studied the way RNA molecules from the microorganism Tetrahymena thermophila split into fragments. He discovered that RNA molecules inside a test tube split themselves using a complicated chemical reaction, despite the absence of a protein.
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