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Har Gobind Khorana shared the 1968 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Robert W. Holley and Marshall W. Nirenberg "for their interpretation of the genetic code and its function in protein synthesis."
Khorana's birth date is recorded as January 9, 1922 in Raipur, India, now part of Pakistan. The son of a village agricultural taxation clerk, Khorana and his family were poor. Yet, because Khorana's parents made school a priority for their children, he was able to continue his education at Punjab University in Lahore, India, where he earned a B.Sc. with honors in 1943 and an M.Sc. with honors in 1945. He then received a Government of India Fellowship that gave him the opportunity to study at the University of Liverpool, England. He earned a Ph.D. degree in 1948 under Roger J. S. Beer. In the following year, he carried out postdoctoral research with Vladimir Prelog at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland. From 1950-1952, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Cambridge University, working with Alexander Todd and G. W. Kenner. Here he began his work on proteins and nuclei acids.
Khorana firmly established his research group during 1952-1960 in the organic chemistry section of the British Columbia Research Council and the University of British Columbia, Canada. During this period, he collaborated with John G. Moffatt, and they published the synthesis of coenzyme A in 1959. He moved his research group to the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1960, where he remained until 1970. Then he became the Alfred P. Sloan Professor in the Department of Biology and Chemistry at MIT, where he still is actively involved in research.
Khorana's Nobel-Prize-winning work involved the replication of 64 different genetic signals, called triplets, through the synthesis of polynucleotides of known composition. In addition, he determined the exact order of the nucleotides and proved the code. He developed the synthetic protocols needed to synthesize nucleic acid. In 1970, his group made another breakthrough when they synthesized the first wholly artificial gene. Since 1980, Khorana has been working on the chemistry and biology of rhodopsin, the photoreceptor in the rod cells of the eye.
Har Gobind Khorana married Esther Elizabeth Sibler, a native of Switzerland, in 1952. He has said that his wife "brought a consistent sense of purpose into his life at a time when, after six years' absence from the country of his birth, Khorana felt out of place everywhere and at home nowhere." They have three children.
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