Biography of Har Gobind Khorana
Biography of Har Gobind Khorana
Har Gobind Khorana was an Indian-born American biochemist. He lived in India till 1945, then moved to the United States of America and became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1966. He won the Nobel Prize in 1968 for physiology along with Marshall W. Nirenberg and Robert W. Holley. Khorana is considered the founding father of Chemical Biology.
Family and Education
Khorana was born in a Punjabi Hindu family on 9 January 1922 (estimated). His father was Krishna Devi Khorana and his mother was Ganpat Rai Khorana. His family lived in Raipur, Multan, Punjab, British India (now in Pakistan). His father used to work as a taxation clerk in the British Indian Government. Despite Poverty, his father decided to educate all his five children.
As Khorana lived in a very rural area, there is no formal school. So his schooling started under a tree with a group of students and only one teacher. He was very talented from his childhood and attracted the attention of the teacher. This teacher helped him to get admitted to a good school. Then he attended Dayanand Anglo Vedic High School in Multan.
In 1943, he achieved a bachelor's degree from the Punjab University and a Master of Science degree in 1945 from the same institution. Mahan Singh, a great experimentalist of that time was his supervisor.
Later he moved to England. He managed a Government of India Fellowship and studied Organic Chemistry at the University of Liverpool on this. In 1948, he received his Ph.D. degree and in 1949 he pursued a post-doctoral degree from ETH Zurich, Switzerland. There he was associated with Professor Vladimir Prelog.
Khorana married Esther Elizabeth Sibler in 1952.
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Research Works
While at Madison, Khorana helped decipher the mechanism by which RNA codes for the synthesis of proteins. He also started to work on synthesizing functional genes.
The greatest work of his entire career is to interpret the genetic code and its function in protein synthesis. For this work, he was awarded the Nobel Prize. Khorana made important contributions to this field by building different RNA chains with the help of enzymes. Using these enzymes, he was able to produce proteins.
Khorana was the first biochemist to synthesize oligonucleotides chemically. It was the first synthetic gene. The process he invented for gene synthesis is still applicable. These artificial genes are widely used in biology labs for sequencing, cloning and engineering new plants and animals. This technology is also used to understand gene-based human diseases by DNA analysis.
Later years, he researched the biochemistry of bacteriorhodopsin which is a membrane protein that converts light energy to chemical energy. The results of this research were very significant for creating renewable energy sources commercially.
In the 1960s, Khorana confirmed Nirenberg's findings that the way the four different types of nucleotides are arranged on the spiral 'staircase' of the DNA molecule determines the chemical composition and function of a new cell. The 64 possible combinations of the nucleotides are read off along a strand of DNA as required to produce the desired amino acids, which are the building blocks of proteins.
He also added details about which serial combinations of nucleotides from which specific amino acids. He proved that the nucleotide code is always transmitted to the cell in groups of three called codons.
Career
While his post-doctoral studies in Switzerland, he worked for a year on alkaloid chemistry in an unpaid position.
In 1952, Khorana moved to Vancouver, British Columbia. At the University of British Columbia, he joined a research position. This work in British Columbia was on "Nucleic Acids and Synthesis of Many Important Biomolecules". Then Khorana got a condition-free workplace to research independently and so he was very delighted.
Khorana was a co-director of the Institute for Enzyme Research at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
In 1962, he became a professor of Biochemistry and was named Conard A. Elvehjem Professor of Life Sciences at Wisconsin-Madison.
Khorana was the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Biology and Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1970.
He was also a member of the Board of Scientific Governors at the Scripps Research Institute.
While working at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, he was elected as a foreign member of the Royal Society.
Awards and Recognition
Har Govind Khorana was an institutionally recognized biochemist. His research papers and findings are published in world-famous journals. He got the highest recognition for his works as he won the Nobel Prize in 1968 for physiology along with Marshall W. Nirenberg and Robert W. Holley.
- Khorana Program, a program to build a seamless community of scientists, industrialists, social entrepreneurs was built by the University of Wisconsin, Government of India and the Indo-US Science and Technology Forum jointly in 2007.
- In 2009, Khorana was honoured by Khorana Program at the 33rd Steenbock Symposium in Madison.
- Khorana won Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University in 1969.
- He won Lasker Foundation Award for Basic Medical Research in 1969
- He was awarded The Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement in 1971.
- Khorana won The Willard Gibbs Medal of the Chicago Section of the American Chemical Society in 1974.
- He was awarded The Gairdner Foundation Annual Award in 1980.
- He won the Paul Kayser Inter Award of Merit in Retina Research in 1987.
Death
Har Gobind Khorana died on 9 November 2011 at Concord, Massachusetts, United States. At that time he was 89 years old.
Khorana was one of the best biochemists of all time. He was the pioneer of modern biochemical researches. He was not only involved in research but also interested in mass education, in students and young people.
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