Episode 28 – Thomas Steitz – A Nobel Profession

This week’s guest is Thomas Steitz. He is a Sterling Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Chevy Chase, Maryland and Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. Steitz was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry along with Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Ada Yonath for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome. Steitz also won the Gairdner International Award in 2007 for his studies on the structure and function of the ribosome which showed that the peptidyl transferase was an RNA catalyzed reaction, and for revealing the mechanism of inhibition of this function by antibiotics.