The problems Dr. Steitz solved were “daunting,” said another friend, Thomas R. Cech of the University of Colorado at Boulder, who shared the chemistry Nobel in 1989. Dr. Steitz, he added, had “a talent that is indescribable.”
“It is not just being a great scientist,” he said in an interview. “It is being an artist.”
Dr. Steitz was surrounded by Nobel laureates, as both mentors and friends, throughout his career. He went on annual ski trips with some of the giants of biochemistry and biophysics and their families, an event he named “Riboski” because the participants were studying the biochemistry of ribonucleic acid. Over dinner, they would recall, he would make them groan with bad puns.
Thomas Arthur Steitz was born in Milwaukee on Aug. 23, 1940, the oldest of five children. His father, Arthur, was in charge of personnel at the Milwaukee County Hospital. His mother, Catherine (Brown) Steitz, took care of Tom and his siblings. For his first nine years his family lived above a paint store, before moving to a Milwaukee suburb, Wauwatosa, Wis.
Dr. Steitz received a full scholarship to Lawrence College, in Appleton, Wis., where his teacher Robert Rosenberg, a shaping influence on him, introduced him to chemistry.
“I still recall the early lectures in his introductory chemistry course, where he introduced to us the concepts of atomic orbitals and bonding and how studying chemistry at the physical chemical atomic level allowed us to understand the properties of chemicals, such as their color,” Dr. Steitz wrote in his Nobel autobiography. “It was a wonderful revelation to me about how the world around me could be understood.”
Determined to continue his studies, he went to Harvard for graduate school. There, in 1963, he heard a lecture that changed his life.
It was given by Max Perutz, a renowned scientist who had shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with his colleague John Cowdery Kendrew for discovering a way to determine the positions of all the atoms in large protein molecules. It was a major advance, because it allowed scientists to make detailed molecular models of proteins and see which areas were important and why.
