Sidney Altman

Origins and early life

Sidney Altman was born in Montreal on 7 May 1939 to Jewish immigrant parents from Eastern Europe: his mother Ray Arlin had come from Białystok at eighteen with her sister and worked in a textile mill to pay the passage of the rest of the family, and his father Victor, born in Ukraine and brought over as a farm labourer, kept a small grocery in Montreal. He read physics at MIT, played on its ice hockey team, spent eighteen months in a graduate programme at Columbia that gave beginners no laboratory work and left it, then took a doctorate in biophysics at Colorado in 1967 and went on to Harvard and to the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge.

Work and career

At Yale, where he spent the rest of his career, he worked on a bacterial enzyme called ribonuclease P, which trims transfer RNA to its working length. The enzyme was made of a protein and a piece of RNA, and everyone assumed the protein did the cutting, since catalysis was what proteins were for. Altman separated the two and found the opposite: the RNA cut on its own, and the protein only helped. A molecule that carries information could also do chemistry, which meant that the old question of whether the first genes or the first enzymes came first had a possible answer in a single kind of molecule.

He shared the 1989 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Thomas Cech, who had found catalytic RNA by another route, and died on 5 April 2022.