Health
RNA Center founder Harry Noller cements a legacy of brilliance and creativity
The visionary who discovered that RNA powers the ribosome now turns his focus to his other lifelong loves: his saxophone, vintage cars, and family.
Professor Noller won the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences in 2017 for his discoveries about the ribosome. (Photo by Carolyn Lagattuta)
Key takeaways
- Harry F. Noller is best known for his foundational discovery that RNA powers the ribosome, the cellular machine that translates genetic code into proteins.
- Noller is the founder of UC Santa Cruz’s Center for Molecular Biology of RNA, which he started in 1992. This was the first center of its kind in the United States and has since grown into one of the largest global communities for RNA researchers.
- Beyond his scientific work, Noller is recognized for his passions for jazz saxophone and restoring vintage cars. He views creativity in both science and music as intimately intertwined, requiring both ingenuity and hard work.
Harry F. Noller first visited the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 1968 to interview for a faculty position. The university was only three years old. He remembers getting out of the car and immediately being awestruck by the lush, towering forest of coast redwoods, with no buildings in sight. “This is actually an easy interview. I’ve already made up my mind,” he thought.
Over the next six decades, Noller’s research group at UC Santa Cruz led breakthroughs in the burgeoning field of ribosomal and RNA research. He may be best known for the discovery that the ribosome, a necessary cellular machine for life on Earth, is powered by RNA to turn genetic code into the proteins that give cells their structure and function. His foundational contribution to our understanding of this important protein, one that defines life as we know it, was recognized with the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences in 2017.
Noller’s self-described “possession” by the ribosome also inked a legacy that reaches far beyond UC Santa Cruz through the foundations he laid for future ribosomal work and the substantial contributions of his mentees to the field of molecular biology.
In 1992, he founded the UCSC Center for Molecular Biology of RNA, the first of its kind in the United States, which has grown into one of the largest communities of RNA researchers worldwide.
Now Noller, 86, is preparing to retire his groundbreaking lab on campus after 58 years of cutting-edge research. His legacy will live on through the RNA Center, which will continue operations.
“It’s not so common in science for someone who is such a spectacular researcher to also be such a great person,” said RNA researcher Tom Cech, who shared the 1989 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Sidney Altman for their discovery of the catalytic properties of RNA. “Harry is a role model for researchers and professors beyond all the papers that he’s published, and all the discoveries that he’s made.”
Before the ribosome, there was jazz
Noller has long been known as a critical figure in deciphering the ribosome’s structure and function, but those who know him describe him through his love of the saxophone, cars, and people.
“Harry Noller isn’t like most other biochemists. Rarely do the words cool and biochemist appear in the same sentence, but Harry is cool,” Cech wrote about Noller in his book, The Catalyst, which tells the stories of scientists who have made breakthroughs in biology.
By all metrics, and against perceived odds, Noller is very cool. He drives vintage cars, a 1966 Ferrari and a 1966 Maserati. He plays jazz music with friends whenever he has the chance.
In Noller’s life, creative expression and ingenious science seem to be “intimately intertwined,” as he describes RNA, ribosomes, and the origin of life. “There’s creativity in both disciplines, and hard work,” said Noller of his two lifelong interests, science and music.
“Harry Noller isn’t like most other biochemists. Rarely do the words cool and biochemist appear in the same sentence, but Harry is cool.”
nobel-winning RNA researcher Tom Cech
In 1968, when Noller began his storied career at UC Santa Cruz, he was the second molecular biologist at the new campus. “The campus was very embryonic when I first came,” Noller said. Back then, it had just over 2,500 students, compared to over 19,000 today.
It was also a different environment from the one in which Noller had done his postdoctoral training in Geneva, where he was surrounded by other molecular biologists. But Santa Cruz and Geneva shared something very important to Noller, something missing from other places he interviewed: the ability to look out the window and see natural beauty.
“He would be sitting [in his office] looking at the redwoods, and you would ask him a question, and he would not answer,” said Winship Herr, Noller’s longtime mentee and friend, now an emeritus professor at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, as he grinned with nostalgia of his days as an undergraduate in Noller’s class and lab. “He was mesmerized by the beauty of Santa Cruz. And it’s part of the reason why he’s been so faithful to Santa Cruz.”
Equally important, Noller also quickly found a community of fellow jazz musicians. He is an accomplished and passionate saxophonist. He started playing music at age 11 on a secondhand clarinet his grandpa had gifted him, but he quickly set his heart on the saxophone. A life as a musician always tempted Noller, but he knew there wouldn’t be much opportunity to do chemistry as a musician; he could always play music as a chemist.
The first time he went to a jam session in Santa Cruz, Noller was wowed by a trumpeter who he thought sounded like Dizzy Gillespie. That trumpeter was the county’s district attorney, Peter Chang. Upon learning that, Noller thought, “I’ve died and gone to heaven.”
The origin of Noller’s possession
Noller’s fascination with the ribosome wasn’t as immediate as his love for music. He completed his doctorate in chemistry at the University of Oregon Institute of Molecular Biology, where he learned the central dogma from James Watson and watched Francis Crick decipher the genetic code when the famous pioneers in modern molecular biology visited the institute.
Noller then went to the University of Cambridge for his first postdoctoral fellowship. Here, while studying typical protein chemistry, a chance comment changed the course of his life.
At a charity dinner in 1966, Noller told future Nobel laureate Sydney Brenner that he was sequencing an “ordinary and boring” protein. Brenner responded, “That’s stupid. If you’re a protein chemist, why don’t you work on something interesting, like the ribosome?”
Brenner’s question sparked Noller’s lifelong obsession with the ribosome. “That was the most important thing anyone ever said to me,” Noller recalled.
“He’s a true scientist. He’s not in the business for the glory.”
Winship Herr, University of Lausanne
The ribosome is central to all life on Earth: Life is composed of proteins, and proteins would not exist without ribosomes. That’s why, since its discovery in 1955, the ribosome has been a focus of molecular biology research.
“Harry realized that the ribosome is where genotype meets phenotype,” said Herr. “It’s where the coding elements of life, the DNA and the RNA, come together to make the workhorses of life, the proteins.”
The ribosome plays a key role in the canonical idea that molecular biologists call “the central dogma,” which describes how the blueprint of life, written in DNA, creates structure and function through proteins.
According to the central dogma, DNA is transcribed into RNA, which is then translated into proteins. The ribosome is crucial to this process: it follows the directions delivered by RNA to assemble proteins. Which make up 42% of human body weight, not counting water.
For instance, collagen, a structural protein, provides both strength and elasticity to the body’s tissues, such as skin and bones. And hemoglobin, a functional protein, transports oxygen from the lungs to the rest of the body. These are only two examples of the tens of thousands of unique proteins in a human cell.
At the beginning of Noller’s career, in the 1960s, scientists did not know how the ribosome translated RNA into protein. Much of our understanding of how the ribosome is powered and assembled by RNA to create life stems from Noller’s pioneering journey into the brave new RNA world.
Noller’s journey to seeing the ribosome at an atomic level
In 1972, Noller published his first breakthrough in RNA research by applying his classical biochemistry training.
Noller and Brad Chaires, an undergraduate student, found that inactivating RNA in the ribosome inactivated the ribosome. This showed that the presence of RNA in the ribosome wasn’t just structural; it played an active and necessary role in making protein.
This finding was so unexpected that its importance wasn’t immediately recognized or accepted by the field of molecular biology.
“He was really the first to show experimentally that RNA has enzymatic activity,” said Jüergen Brosius, a former student of Noller’s who is now an emeritus professor at the University of Münster in Germany.
This important discovery of RNA’s critical role in the ribosome’s function was owed to “the good old-school biochemistry that Harry excelled at,” said Rachel Green. She did her postdoctoral studies in Noller’s lab before starting her own lab studying the ribosome at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where she is now a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor.
Following this breakthrough, Noller took a sabbatical in 1975 to learn DNA sequencing from the soon-to-be two-time Nobel laureate Fred Sanger.
While on this sabbatical, he worked at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin. There, Noller would meet Brosius, his longtime friend and important collaborator.
It happened one fateful night, when Noller heard the American Forces Network, a U.S. government-operated broadcast, coming from somewhere down the hall. When Noller investigated the source of the familiar sound, it led him to Brosius’s lab.
“There was this little guy in a lab coat with round glasses and a beard, a graduate student from the institute,” Noller said. “We became friends.”
They bonded in Berlin, where Brosius introduced Noller to his favorite pubs. They both love jazz, motorcycles, and cats. They would acknowledge Noller’s cat for “discussion” in their papers as “K. Katze” (short for kleine Katze, German for “little cat”). To this day, they sign off emails to each other as “J. Katze” and “H.F. Katze.”
Their 50-year friendship began in Berlin and continued in California when Noller convinced Brosius to come to the Golden State for his postdoctoral work. At UC Santa Cruz, Noller worked with Brosius to sequence ribosomal genes. They presented the sequence in 1978 at a ribosome meeting in Salamanca, Spain.
Once they had the sequence, a string of nucleotides that would be transcribed into RNA, Noller then collaborated with molecular biologist Carl Woese to visualize how the RNA read out from these genes folded into two-dimensional structures within the ribosome.
The natural next step was to understand how these two-dimensional RNA components folded into the ribosome’s three-dimensional structure.
Noller used X-ray crystallography to answer that question. This technique reveals the structure of crystalline materials by mapping how X-ray beams shot into a crystal are diffracted by the atoms of the crystal; Rosalind Franklin famously used X-ray crystallography to divulge the double-helix structure of DNA.
X-ray crystallography can only be used to find the atomic arrangement of a structure that is crystallized, so Noller’s first task was to crystallize the ribosome. “The myth at the time was you can’t crystallize RNA,” said Noller. Indeed, his initial attempts to crystallize the ribosome were unsuccessful, but he kept trying.
As he struggled to produce a crystalized ribosome, Noller received an unexpected letter in the mail from a couple in Russia. Marat Yusupov and Gulnara Yusupova, molecular biologists some 6,000 miles away from Noller’s forested lab, had successfully crystallized the ribosome. He invited the couple to Santa Cruz and asked them to bring the crystal with them.
After the Yusopovs settled in Santa Cruz, Noller plucked another unexpected envelope out of his mailbox that thrust his career forward. In 1992, the Lucille P. Markey Charitable Trust awarded Noller $2.5 million to open the UC Santa Cruz RNA Center.
“His mailbox would be stuffed with university mail,” said Herr. “He would look in and see if he had any personal letters … and he would leave everything [else] in his box in a protest against all these demands for bureaucracy.”
A small coalition of UC Santa Cruz RNA researchers, led by Noller, had visited the head of the Markey Trust at Stanford University a couple of years prior. Noller thought they were chasing a dream when they proposed an RNA Center at UC Santa Cruz. When Noller opened the unexpected gift, awarding the funds, he expected an embarrassing rejection.
A sizeable portion of the gift was used to purchase structural biology laboratory equipment essential for UC Santa Cruz’s emerging RNA researchers to compete globally, including X-ray crystallography equipment.
A team called “Mission: Impossible,” comprising Noller, the Yusupovs, and a graduate student, Jamie Cate, continued to improve the level of detail in their X-ray crystallography using the new equipment.
They raced against others around the globe. While others published structures of pieces of the ribosome, Noller’s group aimed to publish the complete structure of the ribosome.
The team accomplished its goal in 1999, when they published complete high-resolution X-ray crystal structures of the 70S ribosome in Science. Images from their work were featured on the cover of the renowned academic journal. It was a breakthrough in the field’s understanding of the ribosome because structure defines function. The images showed how the ribosome’s functional sites were composed of RNA, just as Noller had suggested in 1972.
“I was hoping I would see the structure of the ribosome in my lifetime,” Noller said. “The very idea that I would have anything to do with it was sheer fantasy.”
Noller’s accomplishments in publishing these structures, and his prior work on the functional properties of RNA in the ribosome, are widely regarded as groundbreaking.
“He should have gotten the Nobel Prize,” said Brosius, still irate that his friend and luminary was left out of the 2009 award. “He’s the best scientist I ever met.”
He never won the Nobel Prize. But Noller is irreverent, Herr said: “He’s a true scientist. He’s not in the business for the glory.”
Even so, Noller’s impact is undeniable. In 2017, his contribution to molecular biology was recognized with the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences.
Noller is now using cryo-electron microscopy, a technology that has recently been revolutionized by advances in image processing, to create a visualization of the ribosome that shows every single atom in its structure.
He calls his prior seminal X-ray crystallography of the ribosome “so last millennium.” Still, even seeing the structure of the ribosome at this level of detail was beyond his imagination, Noller said.
Noller’s far-reaching influence
Before, during, and after each of his colossal scientific discoveries, Noller prioritized teaching. “I would be extremely proud to be in his position for the influence he’s had on people,” said Herr.
The Noller lab has been home to 178 students, many of whom have gone on to succeed as career scientists. Noller’s former students describe him as infectiously passionate, courageously brilliant, and always generous with his time.
In a Cold Spring Harbor Oral History video from 2001, Noller told Herr that he learned something new every time he taught his biochemistry of macromolecules class—the same one that Herr took around 1971. “Scientists who don’t teach are missing part of science,” Noller said.
Herr recounted a time when Noller spent a whole day with him: Noller appeared as the main character, alongside his Porsche, in a film Herr made for an undergraduate class at UC Santa Cruz.
“He should have gotten the Nobel Prize.”
Jüergen Brosius, University of Münster
Noller’s final graduate student, Dustin Niblett, graduated with his Ph.D. in 2025 and recounted how Noller always made time for him. “He was always checking in on us and meeting with us one-on-one, giving a lot of encouragement,” he said.
Noller’s mentoring practices influenced how Brosius and Green ran their own labs.
“He knew how to tickle each person in a way that brought out their most productive nature,” said Green, recounting a time that she struggled with reviewers’ critiques on a draft of a research paper. Noller patiently coaxed her into seeing a path forward.
“Harry didn’t talk much,” said Brosius. “The quality of his advice and his words was much more significant than the quantity.”
The next chapter
When Noller retires his lab this year, it will mark the end of an over 60-year career as a preeminent researcher of life at the molecular level and 34 years as a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He has been retired from teaching for more than 10 years, but continued his research and mentorship as an emeritus professor.
When asked how much longer he intends to continue his academic work, Noller said, “As long as it remains interesting.” It still is, he explained, but now he feels pulled to his other love—music.
With his scientific legacy cemented, Noller is now making time for his other lifelong passions: personal connections, crossword puzzles, cars, and music. His saxophone is calling him home.
Noller’s wife, Laura Lancaster, said their cat, Minnie, will be happy to have him home more, too. She said that Noller is Minnie’s favorite person—she’s always in his lap.
Together, they will host friends and family. Noller enjoys grilling ribs and salmon on the deck for summer gatherings. Lancaster hopes he will build new coffee tables for their home; she speaks of him as an accomplished woodworker.
Noller aims to balance and synchronize the carburetors on his vintage Ferrari. And of course, throughout it all, he said he’ll be practicing his saxophone “with a vengeance.”