Nobel laureate will give Morgenthaler lecture

Nobel Laureate Thomas Cech will present " At the Intersection of the Research and Commercial Highways" at 4 p.m. Wednesday, September 19 in Rockefeller Auditorium. Cech is a distinguished professor at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and president of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Cech, a nationally known biochemist, will speak at CWRU as part of the University's Morgenthaler E4I Lectureship (Engineering Educational Excellence in Entrepreneurship and Innovation) lecture series designed to focus on entrepreneurship in engineering.

The lecture is free and open to the public, but registration is required either by telephone at 216-368-8760, by fax at 216-368-6939, or online at http://www.case.cwru.edu/lecture/register.html. A reception in the Hovorka Atrium in Clapp Hall will follow the lecture.

David Morgenthaler, chairman and founder of Morgenthaler Ventures, is the sponsor. The company is a national venture capital firm with offices in Cleveland, Boston, and Silicon Valley. It manages nearly a billion dollars in capital and is focused on helping entrepreneurs to build growth companies.

"Dr. Cech's lecture will address the synergy between academic and entrepreneurial activities, and help motivate faculty and students to view their research results with an eye toward commercialization," said Robert Savinell, interim dean of the Case School of Engineering. "We expect it to bolster our attitude of entrepreneurship on campus, and enlighten us further on the challenges and rewards of new ventures and licensing technology to third parties."

Cech's research has had a profound impact on long-held theories about chemical bonds, proteins, and biological reactions. His research group's 1982 announcement that an RNA molecule from Tetrahymena, a single-celled pond organism, cut and rejoined chemical bonds in the complete absence of proteins provided the first exception to the long-held belief that proteins always catalyze biological reactions. This discovery has been heralded as providing a new, plausible scenario for the origin of life.

Moreover, it is now recognized that RNA catalysts, or "ribozymes," might provide a new class of highly specific pharmaceutical agents, able to cleave and thereby inactivate viral RNAs or other RNAs involved in disease. He conducts his current research on ribozyme structure and on telomerase in his Boulder, Colorado, laboratory.

Cech is a member of the National Academy of Sciences. In addition to the Nobel Prize in Chemistry (1989), Cech's work has received numerous national and international awards and prizes, including the Heineken Prize of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences (1988), the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award (1988), and the National Medal of Science (1995). In 1987, the American Cancer Society named Cech to a lifetime professorship.

For more information on the event, visit http://www.case.cwru.edu/lecture.

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