Learning from ribozymes
- Department of Biochemistry, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, California 94305-530, USA
- Corresponding author: herschla{at}stanford.edu
This extract was created in the absence of an abstract.
I had arranged to meet Tom Cech after the Pfizer Lecture he was giving at Harvard. This was 1986, RNA catalysis was pretty new, and I was a graduate student nearby at Brandeis interested in discussing with Tom the possibility of joining his group for a postdoc. His lecture was masterful—the audience in rapt attention. We all knew, and were taught, that enzymes were proteins—so how could RNA do the job of a protein?
Perhaps I was a bit brash in my youth. But coming from Brandeis, with Bill Jencks, Bob Abeles, Chris Miller, and others who lived and breathed mechanism, it was apparent that there was no real understanding of how the ribozyme was acting. So my opening to Tom was, “That was incredible how everyone was so fascinated by your talk. In my postdoc I want to learn enough about the ribozyme so that, when you come back …
