Meeting a Fork in the Road: An Interview with Tom Cech

摘要

Long before his meteoric rise to a Nobel Prize at age 42 and to the presidency of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) a decade later, Tom Cech was just another guy working down the hall from me. In the mid 1970s, our lives intersected at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) when he was a postdoc and I a graduate student. I recall a lanky midwesterner, modest and likeable, earnestly working on a project that didn't seem too exciting, or certainly didn't seem to be the stuff of scientific breakthrough, prizes, or fame.