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 conducted his senior thesis research on electron decay with Lee Grodzins, and throughout his life, Sid credited Grodzins for inspiring him to consider science as a career.
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.
As a postdoctoral fellow with Matt Meselson at Harvard, Sid continued working on bacteriophage T4, characterizing a DNA endonuclease that acts in its replication and recombination.
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 Prize. 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. In 1982, Thomas Cech, working at the University of Colorado in Boulder, had shown that RNA sometimes served as a biocatalyst—a role previously believed to belong exclusively to proteins.
He worked with ribonuclease-P (an enzyme composed of RNA and a protein), which catalyzes the processing of transfer RNA. Both the protein and RNA were thought to be necessary for the enzyme to work at the cellular level. Altman found that, in vitro, ribonuclease-P alone could splice the transfer RNA molecule at the correct site.
He revolutionized molecular biology by discovering the catalytic properties of RNA. The 1989 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was bestowed upon him and Thomas Cech, who had independently made a similar breakthrough.
Sidney Altman (May 1939 – April 2022) - Molecular biologist
