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Sidney Altman
’80 M.A.H.

YSEA Hall of Achievement

Advancement of Basic and Applied Science – Awarded 1990

At an early age, Albert Einstein was held up as a worthy role model, so Sidney Altman was determined to become a physicist. Born in Canada, he had first set his sights on McGill University, but his interest in physics led him to MIT. From his most accomplished fellow students and brilliant faculty, he thrived in the scientific world finding a new fascination in his senior year from a course in molecular biology.

After graduating from MIT in 1960, he continued his graduate work in physics at Columbia University, as he looked for a laboratory to continue basic research. He found a position at the University of Colorado in biophysics working on DNA and he earned his PhD in 1967. He next joined the Mathew Meselson Laboratory at Harvard University to study recombination of T4 DNA. After two years at Harvard, he was accepted as a member of the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England - home of Francis Crick and other pioneering genetic biologists.

Altman returned to the United States in 1971 with an appointment as assistant professor of microbiology at Yale University. He became a full professor in 1980 and was elevated to chairman of the department in 1983. In 1985 he became Dean of Yale College serving for four years and then returned to teaching and research at Yale.

Sidney Altman’s discovery that the RNA molecule --- the carrier of genetic information – can act as a biochemical catalyst forced a rethinking of how cells transfer information. This discovery resulted in a Nobel Prize in Chemistry awarded in 1989. Altman and his fellow researcher Thomas Cech had upset a dogma of biochemistry and a new and exciting future opened up for applied chemical research. The very mechanism of life would have to be rethought with expected benefits to biochemistry and medical research flowing from this new discovery.
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