Nobel-prize winning biochemist Tom Cech has withdrawn his name for consideration for the presidency of Harvard University, Cech said today from his University of Colorado at Boulder laboratory.
Cech, whose name has been floated as a leading candidate by the Boston Globe, said he already has “great” jobs with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Silver Spring, Md., and at CU, which he visits monthly to work with a staff of 10 scientific colleagues.
“My job at HHMI really fulfills my need to try to enhance biomedical research and science education throughout the country and the world,” Cech said. “And I have commitments to people at the University of Colorado and the state of Colorado.”
Here, Cech supervises five full-time staff members, four post-doctoral scientists who hail from Utah, New York, California and France, and one graduate student. His team’s research addresses detailed chemistry that affects cells’ most basic functions – reproduction and proliferation.
In 1989, he shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Yale University’s Sidney Altman, for discovering that one hereditary molecule – RNA – is also a catalyst, facilitating chemical reactions inside cells. The discovery has led scientists to search for ways to use the catalytic properties of RNA to protect cells from viral infections, according to the Nobel Foundation.
Other research in his laboratory involves telomeres, regions on the tips of chromosomes that are involved in cellular aging and cancer.
“I not only think that mentorship is important, I enjoy it a lot, talking with postdocs and students about the details of science,” Cech said.
Harvard University will not comment on Cech’s announcement, nor will it disclose who else is on the list of potential presidential candidates, said Harvard spokesman John Longbrake.
Howard Hughes Medical Institute is one of the world’s largest philanthropies, with an endowment of about $14.8 billion in fiscal year 2005, according to the non-profit’s web site.
It supports many of the country’s top scientists in biomedicine.
Lawrence H. Summers, Harvard’s most recent permanent president, stepped down last year. He ignited controversy in 2005 after saying that innate differences between men and women may help explain why men score higher in match and science tests.
