Sidney Altman

Sidney Altman was born in Montreal to poor Eastern European immigrant parents and studied physics at MIT before pivoting to molecular biophysics at the University of Colorado and working under Francis Crick and Sydney Brenner at the Medical Research Council Laboratory in Cambridge, England. In 1971, he joined the faculty of Yale University, later serving as dean of Yale College.

In 1978, Altman made the revolutionary discovery that the enzyme ribonuclease P, which processes transfer RNA molecules, contains an RNA component that is essential for its catalytic activity. In 1983, he proved that the RNA molecule alone could perform enzymatic cutting in the complete absence of any protein. Sharing the 1989 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Thomas Cech, their discovery fundamentally transformed origin-of-life science, providing the foundational evidence for the "RNA world" hypothesis.