Tom Cech: New life beyond the RNA World

To hear Tom Cech tell it, he came by his prodigious success — Nobel Prize at 41, presidency of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) this year at 52 — thanks to lots of help from his friends. His 1982 discovery that RNA could behave like an enzyme and splice itself led to the 1989 Nobel in chemistry, which he shared with Sidney Altman. But he says he stumbled into the RNA World — then a small and unfashionable one — pretty much by accident. In 1978 he was studying a DNA transcription unit in Tetrahymena and, during the in vitro transcription reaction, saw that RNA splicing was also taking place. At that time splicing had been observed only in one other lab. The finding was too good to ignore, so Cech turned his attention to RNA. “I was very fortunate that this small, very tight-knit community, which included John Abelson, Christine Guthrie, Joan Steitz, and Jim Dahlberg, among others, just embraced me personally, and our work. I was coming out of nowhere. I didn’t have the credentials they had — they’d all been to the MRC in Cambridge and were already famous scientists — and yet they took us in right away and gave us good advice and supported us.” Thanks in part to Cech’s subsequent discoveries, RNA is now viewed as DNA’s ancestral molecule and a trendy research topic, and the RNA World is no longer small. HHMI investigators, which number around 350 top US biomedical scientists, are not grantees, they are employees. Hughes writes generous checks to support their labs, their equipment, and their staff. Cech had been a Hughes investigator at the University of Colorado at Boulder for more than a decade when he was selected in 1999 to shepherd one of the world’s largest biomedical research organizations into the next millennium. “I had almost no qualifications for this job at all,” he says. Cech now heads a headquarters staff of about 300; only a few are scientists. He spends most of his days at the imposing new HHMI edifice in Chevy Chase, an exceedingly upscale Washington suburb not far from the National Institutes of Health campus in Bethesda, Maryland. Those days are filled with meetings — meetings with accountants and purchasing people and lawyers and the human resources department. Not to mention the people who supervise the Hughes investments that make its legendary largesse possible. The endowment now stands comfortably above $13 billion and counting, more than the Ford Foundation, more even than the gross domestic product of several nations. It is, he points out, far more like running a big corporation than a lab. How has he managed to get his footing on such unfamiliar turf? Once again, others have come to his aid. “One thing that has helped me a lot is the quality of the people here at headquarters, very bright hardworking people with good ideas. I inherited a very functional staff here from Purnell Choppin, the previous president, who did a marvelous job of building this group of people,” he says. A big part of his job is to keep them excited about “doing work in support of some of the most innovative science and science education that’s being carried out in the world today.” When scientists move into administration, they often vow to retain their labs. Cech is among them, jetting back to Boulder for a week or two every month to stay abreast of his colleagues’ investigations of RNA catalysis and telomeres. While it may be useful for R772 Current Biology Vol 10 No 21