One of the first tweaks to the central dogma came when Thomas Cech and Sidney Altman independently discovered that proteins were not the only molecules in the cell that could be enzymes. In work done in the early 1980s that would win them the Nobel Prize, they made the surprising discovery that some forms of RNA could likewise be enzymes. Specifically, they found that some RNA molecules can split themselves by sparking a chemical reaction. They dubbed these catalytic RNAs “ribozymes,” a word conjured up by combining “ribonucleic acid” with “enzyme.”
