Thomas A. Steitz (1940–2018), An Obituary-Tribute

Thomas Arthur Steitz, a prominent molecular and structural biologist, died of pancreatic cancer at his home in Branford, Connecticut on October 9, 2018 at the age of 78. He is survived by his wife. Joan; their son Jon Glenn Steitz; two grandchildren; and four siblings, Richard, William, and Mary Steitz, and Sally Honeck. Steitz was known for his judgment in picking fundamentally important problems, and persisting, sometimes for more than a decade, until he solved them. His work on the information flow from DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) to RNA (ribonucleic acid) to protein culminated in work on the structure of the 50S subunit of the ribosome, for which he shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Israeli crystallographer Ada E. Yonath and Indian-born-American-British structural biologist Venkatraman Ramakrishnan “for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome.”