Wittgenstein Award Laureate
Wittgenstein Award Laureate 2003 Univ. Prof. Dr. Renée Schroeder
RNA folding and catalysis, RNA-binding antibiotics
University of Vienna, Max Perutz Laboratories, Dept. of Biochemistry
Renée Schroeder cv Scientific Career 
The RNA Chaperone Activity Website
LOOKING BEYOND THE OBVIOUS
On the wall of her office in the basement of the Max Perutz Laboratories hangs a poster-sized computer collage made up of countless tiny photos. Their shadings are arranged in such a way that Renée Schroeder’s features can be recognized. ”A present from my group on the occasion of my fiftieth birthday”, she says proudly. Renée Schroeder’s parents were from Luxembourg but she was born in Brazil and moved to Austria at the age of 14. She completed her ”Habilitation” (professorial qualifica-tion) in 1993 and is an internationally recognized scientist in the field of RNA. She has made her mark on our modern understanding of RNA in several key points. For many years she has been massively involved in promoting the public awareness of science and, as a mentor, in increasing the career prospects of young female scientists. She is Vice-President of the Austrian Science Fund, FWF.
Despite all this, she had to wait until she was 53, or to be more precise until International Women’s Day 2006, until she was made a full University Professor – an appointment that is initially limited to two years. She is unsurprisingly critical of the university’s structures but at the same time, ”extremely grateful to the FWF, for without this organization I wouldn’t exist. Both of my boys were born in my post-doc phase and I had a five-year gap in my publications. I managed to re-enter science with the help of a Schrödinger Fellowship. Afterwards, the FWF’s peer review system enabled me to find my true place. It’s important for performance to be evaluated internationally to ensure that good people really have a fair chance; otherwise you have to work your way to the top by being nice.”
Throughout her career, she has been aware that women have particular characteristics and she projects them onto her research field, the seemingly ”female” RNA molecule. ”It is more rounded, more flexible, more versatile but more instable than DNA. But it is at least as important. It subtly controls processes in the cell nucleus and keeps many things in check that would otherwise explode – an almost social type of behaviour. On the other hand, until recently far too many of its functions were attributed to its counterpart, the DNA. DNA is the rigid store of genetic information. Active information is always in the form of RNA.”
Renée Schroeder is not the only person with a passion for ”the molecule of life”. She enjoys the support of the tightly linked international ”RNA community”, which closely protects its collegial relationships against excessive competition. Renée Schroeder has recently completed her first major piece of work since receiving the Wittgenstein Prize: in essence, a study of how RNA manages to fold into complex three-dimensional structures to enable interaction with antibiotics. As a result of her work, modern antibiotics research now starts by looking at the RNA of the target bacteria.
Schroeder hopes next to shed light on the function of RNA polymerase, the enzme that effects the transcription of DNA and RNA. The Wittgenstein Prize has given her ”the flexibility to pursue risky and long-term projects in a creative way.” She is currently interested especially in so - called ”junk DNA” in man and believes that this is transcribed from RNA by the polymerase before its silencing. But she is reluctant to be tied down to a particular goal. ”You have to be sure you don’t say that in five or six years you’ll be here or there. If you do you won’t be able to discover anything really new. I hope to keep my eyes sufficiently wide open that I can look at our vast amounts of data and notice things that don’t fit into the picture. That is where it is really interesting.”
