Sidney Altman
Facts
Photo from the Nobel Foundation archive.
Sidney Altman
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1989
Born: 7 May 1939, Montreal, Canada
Died: 5 April 2022, Rockleigh, NJ, USA
Affiliation at the time of the award: Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA
Prize motivation: “for their discovery of catalytic properties of RNA”
Prize share: 1/2
Work
Enzymes are substances that speed up the chemical processes in organisms' cells without being consumed. It was long thought that all enzymes were proteins. Sidney Altman and Thomas Cech demonstrated that RNA can also function as an enzyme. In 1978, Altman studied an enzyme taken from the E. coli bacteria that has the ability to cleave RNA. This enzyme was a combination of a protein and RNA. Altman discovered that the enzyme lost its ability to cleave if the RNA was removed from the protein. Later, he also succeeded in proving that RNA alone had the same ability to cleave as the enzyme.
Nobel Prizes and laureates
Six prizes were awarded for achievements that have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind. The 12 laureates' work and discoveries range from proteins' structures and machine learning to fighting for a world free of nuclear weapons.
See them all presented here.
