Har Gobind Khorana was an Indian American biochemist who is renowned for constructing the first synthetic gene. He ascended from a childhood of poverty in India to become a Nobel-winning biochemist and went on to teach at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Khorana won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1968 along with Marshall W Nirenberg and Robert W Holley "for their interpretation of the genetic code and its function in protein synthesis."
He was also honoured with the National Medal of Science in the United States in 1966 and the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from the University of Columbia in 1968.
Khorana was born in Raipur (Kabirwala in present-day Pakistan) on January 9, 1922. He was the youngest of five children.
According to the Nobel Prize Organization, Khorana's father was a village agricultural taxation clerk in the British Indian system of government.
Although poor, his father was dedicated to educating his children and they were practically the only literate family in the village inhabited by about 100 people.
Despite poor educational facilities, Khorana completed high school and went on to receive bachelor's and master's degrees in chemistry from University of the Punjab in Lahore.
In 1945, Khorana moved to the University of Liverpool, UK, under a Government of India Fellowship where he obtained a PhD in 1948.
From 1952 to 1960, Khorana served as a faculty at the University of British Columbia, where he began his Nobel Prize winning work in the field of biologically interesting phosphate esters and nucleic acids.
In 1960 Khorana moved to the Institute for Enzyme Research at the University of Wisconsin.
In 1966, he became a naturalized citizen of the US and also received the prestigious National Medal of Science award.
In 1968, he bagged the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine along with Marshall W. Nirenberg and Robert W. Holley for his research that showed how the order of nucleotides in nucleic acids, which carry the genetic code of the cell, control the cell's synthesis of proteins.
From 1970, Khorana was Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Biology and Chemistry at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Khorana died of natural causes in November 2011 in Massachusetts, aged 89. He is survived by his children Julia and Davel.
(With inputs from IANS and nobelprize.org)
