To hear Tom Cech tell it, he came by his prodigious success — Nobel Prize at 41, presidency of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) this year at 52 — thanks to lots of help from his friends. His 1982 discovery that RNA could behave like an enzyme and splice itself led to the 1989 Nobel in chemistry, which he shared with Sidney Altman. But he says he stumbled into the RNA World — then a sm...