Molecular biologist Jeff Coller joins Johns Hopkins As a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor, he will hold appointments in the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences and the School of Medicine By Saralyn Cruickshank / Published March 16, 2021 It was during a research semester abroad in Stockholm, home of the Nobel Prize, that molecular biologist Jeff Coller discovered "scientist" was a viable career path for him, and it was a discovery that he calls magical. Just a few years earlier, biologists Sidney Altman and Thomas Cech had won the Nobel Prize for their discovery that RNA—a building block of cellular function—can start or accelerate its own chemical processes, an ability that had only been considered possible for proteins. Coller happened to be studying a gene with this form of autocatalytic RNA, and from there it all clicked.