Nobel laureate gets guv love

Gov. Bill Ritter isn’t often starstruck.

He is, after all, a man who chatted up California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger – the Terminator himself – about renewable energy during a recent national governors meeting.

But when Nobel laureate and once and future University of Colorado researcher Tom Cech returned to Colorado Thursday to attend one of Ritter’s bill signings, the guv was positively atwitter.

“Tom is truly one of Colorado’s greatest treasures,” Ritter said in a statement accompanying the event.

Later, he raved about Cech’s intelligence, insight and vision when recounting dinners he had in trying to lure Cech back to the state from his job as the president of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

It worked, and Thursday’s bill signing was something of a welcome home gift for Cech. Ritter signed House Bill 1001, which creates a $26.5 million fund to promote the growth of Colorado’s bioscience industry.

“The investment that’s being made here today is a historic investment,” said CU-Boulder Chancellor G.P. “Bud” Peterson.

The money would be used to help researchers get their ideas from the lab to the commercial marketplace, where they could help the broader public. The most obvious application is in helping medical researchers, but Ritter said the money could also go to help people working in the aerospace and renewable energy fields.

“There’s no one thing that we do here that is really going to catapult us into the next phase of the bioscience industry,” Ritter said. “…It’s not any one group that’s going to get this done.”

But clearly Ritter, who worked with numerous other prominent Colorado officials to recruit Cech back to the state, hopes Cech, a biochemist, will play a big part in boosting Colorado’s burgeoning bioscience industry.

For Cech’s part, he seems ready to embrace the challenge.

“I would not be coming back to the state if I thought we were going to do something that is just good,” he said at the bill signing ceremony. “We are going to do something here that is going to be world-class.”

And that might just be the best music to Ritter’s ears since he heard The Terminator say “hydroelectricity.”

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