Har Gobind Khorana is an Indian-American molecular biologist. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1968. An intense worker of the interpretation of the genetic code and its functioning in protein synthesis, Har Gobind Khorana was also awarded the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University in the same year. Har Gobind Khorana became a naturalised citizen of the United States in 1966, and eventually received the National Medal of Science.
Har Gobind Khorana was born in Raipur, Kabir Wala, in January 9, 1922. He spent his childhood in a poor village in British India. Har Gobind Khorana`s father was the village "patwari", or taxation official and his father home schooled him. Later he was admitted in the D.A.V. Multan High School and he finished his B.Sc. from Punjab University, Lahore in 1943 and M.Sc from Punjab University in 1945. Har Gobind Khorana began his studies at the University of Liverpool in 1945. After being awarded a PhD in 1948, he continued his postdoctoral studies in Zürich, until 1949.
Later, Har Gobind Khorana spent two years at Cambridge and his interests in proteins and nucleic acids started at that time. In 1952 he went to the University of British Columbia, Vancouver and in 1960, he moved to the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In 1970, Har Gobind Khorana became the prestigious Alfred Sloan Professor of Biology and Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he worked until retiring in 2007. A member of the Board of Scientific Governors at The Scripps Research Institute, Har Gobind Khorana currently holds Professor Emeritus status at MIT.
Har Gobind Khorana was married to Esther Elizabeth Sibler, who is of Swiss origin, in 1952. They together have three children, Julia Elizabeth (born May 4th, 1953), Emily Anne (born October 18th, 1954), and Dave Roy (born July 26th, 1958). Har Gobind Khorana worked with Ribonucleic acid (RNA), with two repeating units (UCUCUCU ? UCU CUC UCU) and produced two alternating amino acids. This combined with the Nirenberg and Leder experiment and showed that UCU codes for Serine and CUC codes for Leucine.
Har Gobind Khorana also worked with the RNAs with three repeating units (UACUACUA ? UAC UAC UAC, or ACU ACU ACU, or CUA CUA CUA) and thus produced three different strings of amino acids. RNAs with four repeating units including UAG, UAA, or UGA, produced only dipeptides and tripeptides and deduced that UAG, UAA and UGA are stop codons. In this way, Har Gobind Khorana and his team had established that the mother of all codes, the biological language common to all living organisms, is spelled out in three-letter words that are each set of three nucleotides codes for a specific amino acid.
The Nobel lecture of Har Gobind Khorana was delivered on December 12, 1968. He was also the first to create oligonucleotides or the strings of nucleotides and also to isolate DNA ligase, an enzyme that links pieces of DNA together. These custom-designed pieces of simulated genes are extensively used in biology labs for sequencing, cloning and engineering new plants and animals. This invention of Har Gobind Khorana has become mechanical and commercialised so that anyone now can order an unreal gene from any of a number of companies and one merely needs to fax the genetic sequence to one of the companies and receive an oligonucliotide with the preferred sequence.
Har Gobind Khorana once again proved the capability of Indian scientists and their researches that were accredited internationally