Scientist Stories: Thomas Cech, Discovering Ribozymes

Thomas Cech and Sidney Altman discovered that RNA can have enzymatic activities. For this discovery, they shared the 1989 Nobel Prize for Chemistry.

Enzymes are substances that speed up the chemical processes in organisms' cells without being consumed. It was long thought that all enzymes were proteins. Sidney Altman and Thomas Cech demonstrated that RNA can also function as an enzyme. In 1982, Cech studied the way RNA molecules from the microorganism Tetrahymena thermophila split into fragments. He discovered that RNA molecules inside a test tube split themselves using a complicated chemical reaction, despite the absence of a protein.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_...

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