Thomas Steitz – A Nobel Profession

 Episode 28 - Thomas Steitz [27:25] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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.

Born in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin in the same home town as MIPtalk host Brad Rowe, Steitz studied chemistry as an undergraduate at Lawrence University and received a Ph.D. in biochemistry and molecular biology from Harvard University in 1966. He then did his postdoctoral research as a Jane Coffin Childs Postdoctoral Fellow at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology at Cambridge University during 1967-1970. He was also a Macy Fellow doing research at the University of Göttingen during 1976-1977 and a Fairchild Scholar at Caltech during 1984-1985.

He is married to Joan A. Steitz, also a Sterling Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale. He currently lives in Branford, Connecticut.

For additional reference we’ve included links to some of the people, places and things discussed in this episode:

2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry
The Steitz Lab
2007 Gairdner International Award
Inquisitiveness of Milwaukee native leads to a Nobel prize
Structural Basis of Replication and Gene Expression
Steitz and His Team
Press Conference for Thomas Steitz
From Structure and Function of Ribosomes to New Antibiotics
Quotes by and about Yale’s Nobel Prize Winner Thomas Steitz
Researchers illuminate how bacteria become resistant to antibiotics