Sidney Altman received his Nobel price for Chemistry in 1989 for “his discovery that RNA in living cells is not only a molecule of hereditary, but also can function as a bio catalyst.”
As the Royal Swedish of Sciences said in the press release announcing Altman’s Nobel Price; “This discovery which came as a complete surprise to scientists, concerns a fundamentals aspect of the molecular basis of life. Many chapters in our textbooks will have to be revised.”
Sidney Altman was born in the Montreal suburb of Notre Dame-de-Grace of Polish-Russian immigrant parents in 1939. While he was still in high school, Sid and a friend decided on a whim to write the American Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) at McGill.Both friends applied to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston, and as luck would have it, Sid was accepted, but his friend was not. He earned his B.Sc. in 1960.
He then spends eighteen months in graduate school at Columbia University in New York.
He decided to enroll as a graduate student in biophysics at the University of Colorado, where he obtained his Ph.D. in molecular biology.
After a year of research at Harvard, Altman had the great privilege of joining Cambridge. Altman made his initial discovery that eventually led to his Nobel Price.
At the end of his term in Cambridge, he was offered the post of assistant professor at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut which he accepted.
At Yale he progressed to full professor on 1980. At Yale, he continues to work on aspects of the same RNA molecular for which he won the Nobel Price.
Sidney Altman
