Altman, Sidney

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ALTMAN, SIDNEY

ALTMAN, SIDNEY (1939– ), research biologist and educator. Altman, born in Montreal, Canada, received his doctorate in biophysics from the University of Colorado in 1967. He joined the department of biology at Yale University in 1971, becoming a professor in 1980 and serving as chairman of the department 1983–85. He was the dean of Yale College in 1985. In 1989 he shared the Nobel Prize in chemistry with Thomas Cech of the University of Colorado for similar discoveries they made in the 1970s and early 1980s while working independently. They found that in its role as a chemical catalyst, the rna subunit of RNase P from bacteria can cleave some transcripts of genetic information.

[Bracha Rager (2nd ed.)]

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