Khorana, Har Gobind

Khorana, Har Gobind

(born Jan. 9, 1922, Raipur, India) Indian-born U.S. biochemist. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Liverpool and later taught in Canada and the U.S., from 1970 at MIT. He shared a 1968 Nobel Prize with Marshall Warren Nirenberg and Robert William Holley for research that helped show how the genetic components of the cell nucleus control the synthesis of proteins. His contribution was to synthesize small nucleic acid molecules whose exact structure was known. Combined with the proper materials, his synthetic nucleic acids caused protein synthesis, just as in the cell; comparing these proteins with the nucleic acid showed which portions of the nucleic acid were the codes for each part of the protein. In 1970 he prepared the first artificial copy of a yeast gene.

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Khorana, Har Gobind (1922–  ) molecular biologist; born in Raipur, India (now Pakistan). He was a research fellow at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (1948–49) and Cambridge University (1950–52) before moving to the University of British Columbia (Vancouver) (1952–59). There he received international recognition for improving the method of synthesis of acetyl coenzyme A, necessary for cellular metabolism. At the University of Wisconsin (1960–70), he determined the sequence of DNA nucleotide triplets which code for 20 amino acids. This research won Khorana (with molecular biologists Robert Holley and Marshall Nirenberg) the 1968 Nobel Prize in physiology. In 1970 he synthesized the first artificial gene; he then relocated to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1970), where he continued to make major contributions to molecular biology.

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Khorana, Har Gobind 

Born Jan 9, 1922, in Raipur, India. American biochemist of Indian descent. Member of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (1966). Foreign member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1971).

Khorana received a degree from Punjab University in 1945 and one from the University of Liverpool in 1948. He worked at the Federal Polytechnical School in Zurich from 1948 to 1950 and at Cambridge University in Great Britain from 1950 to 1952. He was head of the laboratory of organic chemistry at the University of British Columbia in Canada from 1952 to 1960. In 1960 he became one of the directors of the Institute of Enzyme Research at the University of Wisconsin in Madison (USA) and a professor at that university in 1962. Since 1970 he has worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Khorana’s principal works are on the synthesis of nucleotides, coenzymes, and nucleic acids. He has made a great contribution toward interpreting the genetic code; he has synthesized the simplest genes and a 72-member polynucleotide with a succession of mononucleotides that corresponds to alanine transfer RNA. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1968 with R. Holley and M. Nirenberg.

WORKS

Some Recent Developments in the Chemistry of Phosphate Esters of Biological Interest. New York-London, 1961.

A. N. SHAMIN