From questioning his teachers about rocks and meteorites as a middle schooler to knocking on professors' doors at the University of Iowa and later, to receiving the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1989, Thomas Cech has always been passionate about science. Cech, whose daughter is currently a senior at Dartmouth, is the last of three Montgomery Fellows to visit the College this fall.
Cech was awarded the Nobel prize for his discovery of the catalyzing properties of the RNA molecule in biochemical reactions, previously thought to be restricted to proteins.
The Nobel foundation called to inform Cech that he had won the prize shortly after he had received the Warren Triennial prize at Harvard. Many recipients of the Warren prize also received a Nobel within 10 years; Cech received his within eight hours.
"We know you think this is a joke, so we want to turn the phone across to one of your friends in Stockholm," Cech said in an interview with The Dartmouth, referring to the phone call from the Nobel committee.
Cech said he felt that his election to the National Academy of Sciences in 1987 was on par with receiving the Nobel. Cech does not advocate budding scientists focus on earning the Nobel, though.
"It isn't a good aspiration, " Cech said. "There's usually some serendipity involved and hence [it's] not something you can plan for."
On the other hand, "a better aspiration is to be elected to the NAS " it's very much based on actual creative work," Cech said.
Reflecting on his career, Cech said he felt that his interest in science was well buttressed by growing up in Iowa City, where he attended Grinnell College. He said he was especially grateful towards those professors who opened their doors to him during his pre-college years.
"Now when I look back, they were extremely generous with their time," Cech said. "I'm not sure if I could do that today."
Cech related the tale of meeting his future wife in an organic chemistry lab during his time at Grinnell.
"We would always end up in different sections, until the make-up lab section, when we met over the melting point apparatus," Cech said.
In addition to running a laboratory named after him at the University of Colorado in Boulder, where he received his first faculty appointment, Cech is currently the president of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, a non-profit medical research organization with an endowment over four times larger than Dartmouth's.
Cech's Montgomery Fellow lecture about bringing together scientific disciplines will be held in Filene Auditorium at 4:30 pm on Tuesday.
