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.

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.