24 Quotes by Sidney Altman

Eight months later, having left Columbia, I was studying physics in a summer program and working in Colorado when I decided to enroll as a graduate student in biophysics.

My intention was to enroll at McGill University but an unexpected series of events led me to study physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

We are united in the hope that every individual will someday enjoy at least the intellectual privileges we have had, if not always the material advantages.

I spent eighteen months as a graduate student in physics at Columbia University, waiting unhappily for an opportunity to work in a laboratory and wondering if I should continue in physics.

I was born in Montreal in 1939, the second son of poor immigrants.

By the time I reached high school my father's grocery store had made our life adequately comfortable and I was able to choose, without any practical encumbrances, the subjects that I wanted to pursue in college.

Thus, the pathways leading to the discoveries of RNA catalysis were not as direct as one might imagine from reading about the results in textbooks.

We soon suggested that the RNA subunit of RNase P was part of the active center of the enzyme, by analogy to the then current picture of the ribosome.

No sacrifice was too great to forward our education and, fortunately, books and the tradition of study were not unknown in our family.