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Cech’s discovery that ribonucleic acid (RNA) isn’t just a carrier of genetic information but also a powerful enzyme, kickstarting chemical reactions, earned him the 1989 Nobel Prize in chemistry and wrought a new era of research. In the decades since, his work has brought the slender, long overlooked molecule to the forefront of some of our biggest questions about life on Earth: How did life begin? Why does it end? Now, scientists believe the answers lie with RNA.

Over the course of more than half a century in science, Cech has witnessed the emergence of cutting-edge technologies, and he’s trained multiple generations of scientists to employ those advances. With interdisciplinary training and rapidly changing tech at their fingertips, Cech’s mentees are prepared for the world beyond his lab. And with the recent creation of the Carol and Tom Cech Research Scholars Fund, the Cechs are helping ensure that Grinnell student scientists are being provided with ever more opportunities to tackle the frontiers of science.

The RNA Revolution

Cech, Distinguished Professor of Biochemistry and of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology at the University of Colorado Boulder, did not set out to be an RNA scientist. In fact, at the time that he was wrapping up his doctorate, RNA science barely existed. Since the discovery of its double helix structure in 1953, DNA had been the star of the genetic show.

Keeping en vogue, Cech’s young lab set about to understand transcription — the process by which the genetic information in DNA (the storage unit) is copied to RNA (the messenger) within cells, controlling how characteristics encoded in those genes are expressed in the living organism. But less than two years after establishing his lab at CU Boulder, his focus swerved.

Cech and his research team found that the functional portions of the gene they were studying were interrupted by an extraneous segment known as an “intron.” Much to their amazement, the intron was splicing itself out of the RNA copy of the gene seemingly all by itself. “After finding that something really unusual was occurring, we weren’t going to give up until we figured out how it was happening,” Cech recalls.

Cech went on to show that this RNA was splicing itself without the help of any outside protein enzymes. This meant that the RNA molecule wasn’t just a carrier of genetic code; it was a dynamo, a doer: an enzyme itself.

Cech’s discovery of RNA’s enzymatic activity led to the Nobel Prize in chemistry, shared with Sid Altman of Yale University, and to a daunting new world of research. The technology for studying DNA at the time, let alone RNA, was in its relative infancy, he explains.

“When I was a graduate student, the first DNA sequences were being determined, and it would take someone a year to determine a 15-nucleotide sequence along a DNA molecule,” Cech recalls.

Now, when his lab wants to sequence a piece of DNA, they send it out to a company and one day later, for about $10, they get emailed a sequence of 3,000 nucleotides. “If you had said that would have been possible even 20 years ago, people would have laughed,” says Cech. “It wasn’t even conceivable when I started my lab in Boulder, but now it’s routine, and cheap, and trivial.”

The rapidly changing world of chemistry has meant that Cech is mentoring students through research techniques that are, increasingly, unfamiliar to him. “It’s a completely different world. And, in fact, every 10 years it’s a different world than it was before,” he says.

Fostering Polymaths

Cech is proud to have made scientific contributions that ended up in textbooks. But he’s prouder still of the more than 100 scientists who have trained in his laboratory over the decades.

Fifty-six Cech Lab trainees are now professors around the world. “Some of them are already retired,” he adds, chuckling. Many more Cech Lab alumni have gone on to lead successful careers in biotechnology, medicine, and academic publishing. “If even a small part of the years they spent in our laboratory helped them find a place where they could make an impact using their scientific talents, well, to me that is incredibly gratifying,” says Cech.

Whatever their path, Cech encourages all his mentees to pursue and practice interdisciplinary science. He believes the best scientists are jacks of many trades. Meaningful discoveries come from multi-faceted thinking, says Cech. It’s a belief that stems from his time at Grinnell.

“A scientist, just like someone in many other endeavors, needs to know how to think critically, how to organize the inquiries that they’re making, and then how to present the work in an articulate and persuasive manner,” he explains. “And a Grinnell education is powerful in setting you up for success in those areas.”

In his first year at Grinnell, Cech took a humanities course on “Great Books” with Professor John Crossett. He and his classmates read and critically evaluated significant works of literature, from the Iliad and Odyssey to plays by Shakespeare and Dante’s “Inferno.”

Cech thinks about that course often. Studying literature made him a better thinker, reader, and writer, he says. “You know, that was a fabulous experience. And not just a fabulous experience, but directly useful for a scientist in succeeding in their career.”

At CU Boulder, Cech was pivotal in establishing a graduate program in Interdisciplinary Quantitative Biology. It’s a doctoral program unlike any other, enlisting just eight students each year to study and apply multiple scientific disciplines to answer their research questions.

“If you’re interested in biology and computer science, other programs make you choose which one you’re going to get your PhD in,” Cech explains. “We want you to continue doing both deeply. We want you to be an expert in both biology and computer science. Or biology and physics. Or biology and math.”

Cech was also the founding executive director of the BioFrontiers Institute at CU Boulder, an interdisciplinary research community that engages scientists of all stripes to tackle the biggest challenges in global health. In a rapidly changing world, science cannot be siloed, says Cech. To make groundbreaking discoveries, he believes, scientists must think broadly and work collaboratively.

From Scientist to Author

Cech’s commitment to integrative thinking took on new meaning last year with the publication of his book, The Catalyst: RNA and the Quest to Unlock Life’s Deepest Secrets.

Cech has spent decades teaching general chemistry to first-year university students. But in The Catalyst, he tackled a different audience: readers with only basic scientific knowledge. The Catalyst tells the story of the “RNA Revolution,” from RNA’s days in the shadows of DNA, to Cech’s own work with RNA, and today’s cutting-edge applications of RNA in vaccines and gene-editing.

Though he’s authored hundreds of academic papers, The Catalyst was Cech’s first crack at a popular science book. He was motivated to write it by public wariness and common misunderstandings about the mRNA vaccines rolled out during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Americans don’t like to be told what to do,” Cech explains. “So, I thought, maybe instead of telling people what they have to do, if they just knew a little bit more about how RNA works and the fact that it’s not mysterious — that we’ve understood it for half a century… Maybe then people would come to their own conclusions.”

But translating scientific jargon into PopSci prose was not as easy as he anticipated. Each time Cech was sure he’d finally distilled RNA research as simply and accessibly as possible, his editor offered a reality check: “Try again.”

“The real challenge of doing this was that scientists have built a wall between themselves and the general public,” explains Cech. “They haven’t done it out of meanness or antagonism; it’s just so facile to use jargon when you’re talking to other scientists. But that same jargon inhibits conversations with non-scientists, and that’s much to our discredit.”

The Newest Cech Scholars: Grinnellians

Cech and his wife (whom he met in an organic chemistry lab at Grinnell), Carol Martinson Cech ’70, partnered with the Office of Development and Alumni Relations to create the Carol and Tom Cech Research Scholars Fund in 2020. The fund supports students with a stipend for Mentored Advanced Project (MAP) research as well as an academic year scholarship. Since its creation, 16 students have benefitted from the fund. Many more will be aided by the Cechs’ generosity in the years to come.

The fund is meant to help students in biology, chemistry, biological chemistry, or physics have access to summer research opportunities at Grinnell, when the need for gainful summer employment to finance their studies might otherwise keep them from doing research.

Their own research experiences while they were undergraduates proved critical to both his and Carol’s development as scientists, explains Cech. “We both had research experiences which were more useful in telling us what we didn’t want to do than in telling us what we did want to do. But that’s useful, right?” (During an internship at Argonne National Laboratory, both Tom and Carol discovered they didn’t particularly care for gas phase physical chemistry.)

Whether full-time research cements a student’s passion or redirects them toward a yet undiscovered fascination, the Cechs believe it’s an invaluable experience.

“For some students, it can be a stepping stone to going to graduate school and having a career as a PhD-level researcher,” explains Cech. “And for others who end up going to medical school, nursing, dental, vet school, whatever it might be, it’s so useful for them to see the process of experimental science and to see how difficult it is to make progress.”

Cech knows well that there’s no telling what the future of science will look like. With his support, Grinnell scientists will be ready for the unknown.