Professor Sidney Altman, Nobel Prize Laureate in Chemistry was employed as honorary professor of our university and the employment ceremony was held on December 15th.

Mr. Hu Jun, president of our university expressed his heartfelt thanks to Professor Sidney Altman for his readiness when he was invited to be honorary professor of our university. Mr. Hu hoped that the university and Professor Altman could collaborate on programs design for the students and on more research programs; also, with Professor Altman’s support, we could carry out more inter-school cooperation so as to push forward the development of scientific research of Jinan University.
 

After the employment ceremony, professor Sidney Altman gave a lecture titled “Antibiotics:Present and Future”.

The activity, supported by “Nobel Prize Laureates China Campus Tour Program”,which is organized by State Administration of Foreign Experts Affairs ( SAFEA) was the sixth session of the Nobel Prize Laureates JNU Tour, attracting more than 400 faculties and students from Sun Yat-san University and South China University of Technologies and Engineering.

Prof. Sidney Altman, a famous molecular biologists, biology and chemistry professor of Yale University. His discovering of ribozyme upgraded the world’s understanding towards genetic material. The discovery provided new support to demonstrated that RNA can be both genetic material (like DNA) and a biological catalyst (like protein enzymes), and contributed to the RNA world hypothesis, which suggests that RNA may have been important in the evolution of prebiotic self-replicating systems.

Since the discovery of ribozyme P in 1970, Prof. Altman and his team have been contributed to the research in this field and won the Nobel Prize in 1989. In the past 20 years, their focus has been on EGS and their achievements become the foundation of EGS biochemistry.