Prof. Har Gobind Khorana is the first India-born scientist to receive Nobel prize, was born on 9th of January 1922.
HG Khorana was received the prestigious Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1968 along with Robert W. Holley and Marshall W. Nirenberg “for their interpretation of the genetic code and its function in protein synthesis,” according to the Nobel Prize Organisation website.
In this article, we will discuss about this great scientist’s contribution in modern science.
HG Khorana was the youngest among five children of Krishna Devi Khorana and Ganpat Rai Khorana. He was born in a village named Raipur in pre-independent India (now in Multan, Pakistan).
His father used to work as a patwari, a village agricultural taxation clerk in the British ruled India. Although poor, his father tried his best to provide education to his children.
During his schooling in D.A.V. High School in Multan, Har Gobind Khorana was greatly influenced by his teacher Ratan Lal. Later, he went to Punjab University and received M. Sc. degree. In 1945, Khorana received a Government of India Fellowship to move to England for Ph. D. degree at the University of Liverpool.
From University of Liverpool, he went to Berkshire on an agriculture ministry scholarship for his Ph.D. to study about insecticides and fungicides, however, this seat was already allocated to a returning war veteran. During this time, Khorana had to survive in England without salary for one year. Consequently, Indian High Commission intervened the matter, and it was decided that he would pursue his Ph.D in organic chemistry. This is a classic example of top-down bureaucratic intervention with great outcome.
Khorana started his Ph.D. in 1948 with Vladimir Prelog where he found some prior work on dicyclohexylcarbodiimide (DCC), “pivotal..for the synthesis of nucleotides and nucleotide coenzymes and in gene synthesis”, as mentioned by Uttam L. RajBhandary on Nature journal article about Prof. Khorana.
In 1960, Khorana moved to the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and started working on the genetic code along with the chemical synthesis of a transfer RNA gene.
Khorana conducted chemical synthesis of the first gene in 1970. It was followed by his synthesis of another related gene which he demonstrated as operational in a bacterium in 1979, a landmark experiment in modern genetics. This work opened a new era of “recombinant DNA and underlies the in vitro assembly of whole genomes from shorter DNA strands,” as mentioned in his memorabilia in Nature journal.
It was revolutionary to prepare synthetic gene in the 1970s. His research helped a lot conduct genome editing with the CRISPR/Cas9 system, which has been using in cancer and other complex disease treatment.
Moreover, Khorana made significant contributions to the science of PCR tests, which scientists use today to check SARS-CoV-2 infections.
Nowadays, we talk a lot about interdisciplinary research. Meanwhile, he was a pioneer in it. He did interdisciplinary research in chemistry, biology and physics much before the current trend.
University of Wisconsin, India’s Department of Biotechnology and the Indo-US S&T Forum launched the Khorana Program in 2007. According to the department, the program’s goal is “to nurture contacts between students of biotechnology and biomedical sciences from India and the US, through a joint training programme in biotechnology and allied areas”, and “to encourage post-graduate students to take up research as a career.”
Prof. Khorana was honoured with Padma Vibhushan by the Government of India in 1969.
Quoted as “very modest person” by his colleague Uttam Rajbhandary, Khorana, passed away at the age of 89, in November 2011.
HG Khorana’s daughter Julia once quoted in an article: “Even while doing all this research, he was always really interested in education, in students and young people. After he retired, students would come to visit and he loved to talk to them about the work they were doing. He was very loyal to them, and they were very loyal to him, too.”
