Har Gobind Khorana, born on 9 January 1922 and passing on 9 November 2011, was a Punjabi American biochemist whose groundbreaking work earned him the 1968 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
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He was born in Raipur in Multan, Punjab, British India, to Ganpatrai Khorana and Krishna Devi, in a humble Punjabi Hindu Khatri family. He was the youngest of five children. His father was a patwari, a village agricultural taxation clerk, and despite severe poverty he was determined to educate all his children. Khorana later wrote that his family was practically the only literate family in a village of about one hundred people.
The first four years of his education took place under a tree because that was the only school the village had. He did not even own a pencil until the age of six.
He went on to study at D A V High School in Multan and later at Government College in Lahore. With the help of scholarships, he completed his Bachelor’s degree in 1943 and his Master of Science degree in 1945 at Punjab University in Lahore.
In 1945, Khorana moved to England to pursue organic chemistry at the University of Liverpool with a Government of India Fellowship. He earned his PhD in 1948 under Roger J S Beer. He then continued postdoctoral research at ETH Zurich with Professor Vladimir Prelog, working for nearly a year on alkaloid chemistry in an unpaid role.
His family, meanwhile, was displaced during the Partition and moved to Delhi as refugees. Khorana never returned to visit his birthplace.
In 1949, after struggling to find work in Delhi, he returned to England on another fellowship and joined George Wallace Kenner and Alexander R Todd at Cambridge to focus on peptides and nucleotides. He remained at Cambridge until 1952.
That year he moved to Vancouver, British Columbia, to work at the British Columbia Research Council at the University of British Columbia. Even though the facilities were limited, he was given complete scientific freedom. There he began pioneering work on nucleic acids and the synthesis of important biomolecules.
Later, while serving on the faculty of the University of Wisconsin Madison, Khorana achieved global recognition. In 1968, he shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with Marshall W Nirenberg and Robert W Holley for deciphering how the sequence of nucleotides in nucleic acids encodes the genetic instructions for protein synthesis. That same year, he and Nirenberg also received the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University.
From studying under a tree in a remote village and not owning a pencil until age six to becoming a Nobel laureate who transformed modern genetics, Har Gobind Khorana remains one of the greatest scientific minds of Indian and Punjabi heritage and a global symbol of perseverance, brilliance and human potential.
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