Sidney Altman, a Canadian-born researcher who shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for a discovery about the cellular function of RNA, which changed the fundamental understanding of biochemical processes and has had applications in medicine and gene therapy, has died aged 82.
Altman trained as a physicist before developing an interest in biological sciences and chemistry. He made his key discovery in 1978 when he showed that ribonucleic acid (RNA) – one of the basic molecules present in every living cell – possessed previously unknown properties.
