Thomas R. Cech Quotes

Thomas R. Cech — American Scientist born on December 08, 1947,

Thomas Robert Cech is an American chemist who shared the 1989 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Sidney Altman, for their discovery of the catalytic properties of RNA. Cech discovered that RNA could itself cut strands of RNA, which showed that life could have started as RNA. He also studied telomeres, and his lab discovered an enzyme, TERT, which is part of the process of restoring telomeres after they are shortened during cell division. As president of Howard Hughes Medical Institute, he promoted science education, and he teaches an undergraduate chemistry course at the University of Colorado... (wikipedia)

The overall view of the human genome project has been one of great excitement and positive press, but there are people who have concerns that are quite reasonable, and they are frightened of things they don't understand.

There should be more attention paid to scientific research in the ecology area, and I think that such attention to proper environmental concerns would make the public feel much better about it.

Because all of biology is connected, one can often make a breakthrough with an organism that exaggerates a particular phenomenon, and later explore the generality.

If you want to study one of these strange organisms, you had better have a good justification. It's not good to study gene organisation in some obscure insect that no one's ever heard about.

We really think it is a good thing for scientists to spend a little bit of their time either in the community or in schools or helping to train high school teachers.

Thomas R. Cech Quotes

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