Thomas A. Steitz

Steitz shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for mapping, atom by atom, the ribosome—the cellular machine that turns genetic code into protein. Long associated with Yale and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, he traced the pivot in his own life to a childhood move from downtown Milwaukee into Wauwatosa.

He was born in Milwaukee on August 23, 1940. After a nearly failing second-grade report card in an apartment above a paint store on 27th Street, his family bought a house on 75th Street in Wauwatosa midway through third grade, in 1949. Roosevelt Elementary’s winter rink, Longfellow junior-high shop class—where he wound an electric motor from scratch—and a school alto saxophone (after the band director rejected his father’s C-melody) reshaped a bored kid. He bunched radishes on his grandfather’s Waukesha County truck farm at five cents a dozen, a hundred dozen on a good day, and bought a better saxophone. At Wauwatosa High he finished eighth in a class of more than three hundred and nearly chose music over science; brother Dick’s straight A’s at Longfellow had already been a wake-up call.

Lawrence College led to Harvard and then to the ribosome work that won the Nobel. His wife, Joan, became a molecular-biology eminence in her own right; a son pitched in the Brewers system. Steitz practiced saxophone one to two hours a day and later credited shop-class skills with building protein models in the lab. He died at home in Stony Creek, a Branford, Connecticut, village, on October 9, 2018. Birth was Milwaukee; the beloved stretch—rink, sax, and teachers who would not let him stay bored—was Wauwatosa from about age eight or nine through high school.