1. Sidney Altman was a Canadian-American molecular biologist, who was the Sterling Professor of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology and Chemistry at Yale University.
10 Facts About Sidney Altman
1. 2.
Sidney Altman's father, born in Ukraine, had been a worker on a collective farm in the Soviet Union.
3.
Sidney Altman was sponsored to come to Canada as a farm worker, but later, as a husband and a father of two sons, he supported the family by running a small grocery store in Montreal.
4.
Sidney Altman went to the United States to study physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
5.
Sidney Altman's project was a study of the effects of acridines on the replication of bacteriophage T4 DNA.
6.
Sidney Altman joined Matthew Meselson's laboratory at Harvard University to study a DNA endonuclease involved in the replication and recombination of T4 DNA.
7.
Later, at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England, Sidney Altman started the work that led to the discovery of RNase P and the enzymatic properties of the RNA subunit of that ribozyme.
8.
Sidney Altman was Chairman of his department from 1983 to 1985 and in 1985 became the Dean of Yale College for four years.
9.
Sidney Altman was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1988 and a member of both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society in 1990.
10.
Sidney Altman died on April 5,2022, in Rockleigh, New Jersey, after a long illness.