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Dr. Har Gobind Khorana was awarded a Nobel Prize in medicine and physiology along with two other scientists "for having written the most exciting chapter in modern biology."Four years later he succeeded in creating the first man-made gene. Khorana was the youngest of five children born in Raipur, India into a poor Indian village. His parents believed in education and Khorana earned his M.S from Punjab University and a PhD from the University of Liverpool in  England. He
completed his postdoctoral
in Zurich, Switzerland. After returning to India for a short time he
went back to England and worked at Cambridge University. It
was while he was here that he became interested in nucleic acids.
This research would finally lead him to "cracking the genetic code."Dr. Khorana was invited to the University of British Columbia, Vancouver and it is there that he did further research into nucleic acids. In 1960 he moved to the University of Wisconsin where he continued his research on genetics. Scientists already knew the shape of DNA and knew it had a lot to do with heredity. What Dr. Khorana did was build on what scientists already knew and create a new understanding of how DNA works. What he was able to do was use synthesizing techniques to spell out all sixty-four three-letter genetic codes. This was a first for medicine and won him the Nobel Prize. His first artificial gene constructed from yeast and bacteria genes followed in 1970 and he moved to MIT where he was able to make a second gene that could survive in a living cell. Dr. Khorana married Esther Elizabeth Silber in 1952 and together they had three children. He likes going on hikes and listening to music , but mostly his joy is in his work. His discoveries have changed science and made new forms of life possible through genetic engineering. |