Indian American Biochemist and Nobel Laureate Har Gobind Khorana passed away

Pioneering Indian American biochemist Har Gobind Khorana, who won the 1968 Nobel Prize for medicine, died in Massachusetts on 9 November 2011. Khorana is known to have revolutionised biochemistry with his pioneering work in DNA chemistry. He had won the Nobel Prize in 1968, sharing it with two others, for unraveling the nucleotide sequence of RNA and deciphering the genetic code.

He was born on 9 January 1922, in Raipur, Punjab (now in Pakistan). However, the Nobel committee is not certain about his date of birth.

Education

He received his bachelor’s degree from Punjab University in 1943 and his master’s from there in 1945. He earned a doctorate in organic chemistry from Liverpool University in England in 1948 and then completed his postdoctoral research at the Federal Institute of Technology in Switzerland. He received a research fellowship at Cambridge University, a center for the study of proteins and nucleic acids.

Works of Har Gobind Khorana

He received the 1968 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Robert W. Holley of Cornell University and Marshall W. Nirenberg of the National Institutes of Health. They worked independently of one another and received the award for showing how genetic information is translated into proteins, which carry out the functions of a living cell.

Dr. Khorana used chemical synthesis to combine the letters into specific defined patterns. His work unambiguously confirmed that the genetic code consisted of 64 distinct three-letter words. He and Dr. Nirenberg discovered that some of the words told a cell where to begin reading the code, and where to stop.
In 1972, Dr. Khorana reported constructed the first artificial gene, using off-the-shelf chemicals. He had developed a new method of synthesizing nucleotides, and achieved international recognition for synthesizing coenzyme A, which is involved in converting fats to energy.

In 1952, he was recruited to the British Columbia Research Council in Vancouver to join a group working on nucleic acids. Khorana was Massachusetts Institute of Technology 's Alfred P Sloan Professor of Biology and Chemistry emeritus. He joined the M.I.T. faculty in 1970 and retired in 2007.

Honours

Dr. Khorana who became an American citizen in 1966, received the Lasker Award for basic medical research in 1968 and the National Medal of Science in 1987.

Indians who won the Nobel Prize

Citizens of India and Indian Origin: Rabindranath Tagore (1913), C. V. Raman (1930), Amartya Sen (1998)
Foreign born Indian Citizens: Mother Teresa (1979),
Indian born Foreign Citizens: Mohammad Abdus Salam (1979), Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar(1983), Hargobind Khorana (1968)
Foreign Citizens of Indian Origin: V.S. Naipaul (2001)