—interviewed by David Montgomery
Dr. Thomas Cech ‘70 (pronounced “Check”) is probably best known on campus for being Grinnell’s only Nobel Prize winner (Chemistry, 1989). But in the decade and a half since the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences honored him, Cech has moved on to other notable projects. He is currently the president of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), the second-largest non-profit organization in America. Cech, a Grinnell College Trustee, will be on campus this weekend for the trustee’s meeting on Friday, and will give a talk on Saturday.
Q: What is your talk on Saturday going to be about?
A: It’s going to be about the discovery that RNA can have enzymatic activity. It’ll be both a review of the discovery that I was given the Nobel Prize for, but also a continuation.
Q: What research have you done since winning the Nobel Prize?
A: For a long period of time we were dedicated to figuring out the mechanism, how it worked. We wanted to understand what happened to each atom, and how it was possible that RNA could speed up a chemical reaction by such a high amount and with such specificity. This is a reaction that takes place in a millisecond. If it were not catalyzed, it would take a few hundred years.
Q: Who is funding your research?
A: Both the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the National Institutes of Health.
Q: What does your role as president of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute entail?
A: We have a $14 billion endowment, which we run out of our headquarters in Washington, D.C. We also do human resources, legal, finance and purchasing. Half of the job is similar to running, say, General Electric. We’ve got about 300 employees at headquarters, mostly non-scientists.
The other half is science- and education-oriented, devising new programs, making decisions about whether current programs are working as well as they could, and bringing the people that we fund together in vibrant new ways. If we just fund some good work at some university, we feel that although that’s okay, we feel that we’ve failed because we haven’t added anything to the mixture. We only feel that we’ve been successful if we make the whole bigger than the sum of the parts, and bring different people together.
Q: How does one become a HHMI Investigator?
A: You have to be nominated by your university. We have competitions where we ask 200 top universities, medical schools, and research institutions to nominate their best people. We’ll convene panels of experts who are not themselves funded by the institute, and have them give us advice about which are the best [prospects]. We want those who are the most innovative and have the best part of their career ahead of them, but also someone who might particularly respond to the extra infusion of flexible support for their work.
We actually employ our investigators; it’s not a grant. There’s some work to be done in making them Howard Hughes employees, making them comply with our standards. We fund them and their research for five years at a time, and then they come up for a review.
Q: How is the HHMI trying to improve science education in America?
A: Well, today science is taught in a way that makes it seem either inaccessible or boring. The irony is that the way scientific research is done is completely transformed from the way it was done ten years ago, and another planet from where it was 50 years ago. But what happens in the classroom is often the same as where it was 50 or even 100 years ago. We want to improve science education for majors and non-majors alike.
If a student’s only going to take one or two science classes in their careers, wouldn’t you want them to be memorable? On the flip side, if you think you’re going to be a science major, you’re often less interested in majoring after taking college-level courses than when you began. We’re driving kids away from their natural love of science.
There’s a natural inclination for most kids to want to be interested in science, but a school system that succeeds in driving this interest out of them is counterproductive. We are trying to seed many pockets of excitement around the country. We are seeing that this has an effect beyond just the places where we provide funding.
Q: Would you say Grinnell’s science education is like the general state you just described?
A: Not to be Pollyanna-ish, I think it’s an example of a better education. It’s especially because of the faculty, their willingness to engage students at every level, not just in class but in their laboratories, for advice at all different levels.
Q: What’s your most memorable class at Grinnell?
A: Freshman humanities, taught by John Crosset. He was a very conservative professor during very liberal times on campus, the Vietnam War era. He taught classics using the Socratic teaching method. It was so different from what I had in high school, and was very important in my development as a writer. One of the most important things as a scientist is to write well.
The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), of which Thomas Cech ‘70 is president, has given Grinnell $2.7 million in grants since 1988, including $1.4 million in 2004. What does that money pay for?
• Research symposiums and seminars
• Student summer research
• Lab equipment such as genome microarrays
• Development of a new neuroscience major
• Synthesis between physical and biological sciences
• Adding bioinformatics, or analyzing biological data with computers, to the curriculum
• Programs where Grinnell students teach science to community elementary and middle-school students
—information from http://www.hhmi.org
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