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Thomas Steitz, who used X-ray crystallography to determine the atomic structure of the ribosome, died of pancreatic cancer on Tuesday (October 9) at age 78.
He was “the master of X-ray crystallography in the current era,” University of Colorado chemist Thomas Cech tells The New York Times.
Born in 1940, Steitz grew up in Wisconsin, where he studied chemistry at Lawrence College, graduating in 1962. He next went to Harvard University, and it was there, in 1963, that he first learned of X-ray crystallography, from a lecture by Max Perutz. Perutz himself had won the Nobel Prize in chemistry the year before with colleague John Cowdery Kendrew for X-ray crystallography on proteins.
In 1966, Thomas Steitz graduated from Harvard with a PhD in biochemistry and molecular biology and spent a year as a postdoc there.
It was at Harvard that Steitz met his wife Joan Steitz, who ...
