Sidney Altman Quotations

However, it was made clear to the first generation of Canadian-born children that the path to opportunity was through education.

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.

I should mention that while I was growing up, Einstein was presented as a worthy role model for a young boy who was good at his studies.

About seven years later I was given a book about the periodic table of the elements. For the first time I saw the elegance of scientific theory and its predictive power.

For our immediate family and relatives, Canada was a land of opportunity.

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.

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.

At the MRC laboratory I started the work that led to the discovery of RNase P and the enzymatic properties of the RNA subunit of that enzyme.

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