Ribozymes are RNA molecules that can act as catalysts, a role scientists once thought only proteins could perform. Thomas Cech and Sidney Altman, working at the University of Colorado Boulder and Yale University, discovered that RNA can splice itself, cutting out introns and joining exons, and they won the 1989 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the finding. The discovery reshaped thinking about the origin of life, since a molecule that can both store genetic information and perform catalytic work sidesteps the old chicken-and-egg problem of which came first, DNA or protein.
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1:11:41>> Ribosymes like ribosymes. >> Yeah. Before this this is huge because I mean it's it sounds like enzyme because it's exactly that. Um before it used to be thought that all organic catalysts and all biological catalysts are in the form of proteins. you need proteins to like do work in the cell. This is the first time that we're discovering >> RNA >> can do that kind of work. This was um Thomas Czech and Sydney Alman at the University of Colorado Boulder and at Yale University. They discovered catalytic RNA molecules like you know that intron and exxon thing like there's a giant gene and then I have to splice out parts that I don't need. That's done by an RNA ribosy. Um, they also figured
1:12:22out that this is um a new way to think about the origin of life because before we used to think, well, what came first, the chicken or the egg? Is it the protein or is it the DNA? Cuz neither can do what the other does. The protein does all the work, but the DNA stores the memory. >> Now we've got a ribosome that does both. It can store genetic information and it can do the work. >> Yeah, that's fascinating. >> They won the 1989 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. And we're going to have an episode coming up that talks more in detail about this. uh one that we've talked about recently