TRIBUTE PAID TO NOBEL LAURETE HAR GOBIND KHORANA

TRIBUTE PAID TO NOBEL LAURETE

HAR GOBIND KHORANA

Indian-born American biochemist Har Gobind Khorana who won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1968 passed away in Concord, Massachusetts at the age of 89.Khorana shared the Nobel with Marshall W. Nirenberg and Robert W. Holley for their research on cell’s synthesis of proteins.
He was born in Raipur, part of Punjab now in Pakistan.
Har Gobind Khorana, the first India-born person to win the Nobel prize after Independence, died of natural causes in Concord, Massachusetts, on Wednesday morning(9^th November,2011). He was 89 and is survived by his daughter Julia and son Dave. Khorana's death was announced on the website of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he was the Alfred P Sloan professor of biology and chemistry emeritus. Khorana, who won the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in 1968, devoted much of his scientific career to unraveling the genetic code and the mechanisms by which nucleic acids give rise to proteins.
'Gobind was a brilliant, path-breaking scientist, a wise and considerate colleague, and a dear friend to many of us at MIT,' said Chris Kaiser, MacVicar professor of biology and head of the department of biology, in an e-mail announcing the news to the department's faculty.
Khorana was born in India in 1922, in a small village called Raipur in Punjab, now in Pakistan. He was the youngest in the family win one sister and three brothers; his father was a patwari (an agricultural taxation clerk) in the British Indian system of government.
Khorana attended high school in the city of Multan before enrolling in Punjab University, where he received his bachelor's degree in 1943 and master's in 1945, both in chemistry and biochemistry. Upon graduating, he received a fellowship from the Indian government to study at the University of Liverpool in England, where he received his PhD in 1948.
He did postdoctoral work at Switzerland's Federal Institute of Technology, where he met his wife, late Esther Elizabeth Sibler. Feeling lost in a new country, Khorana later wrote: 'Esther brought a consistent sense of purpose in my life at a time when, after six years' absence from the country of my birth, I felt out of place everywhere and at home nowhere.'
After returning to England for another postdoctoral position in Cambridge, Khorana and his wife created a new home together in Vancouver, Canada, where he took a job at the British Columbia Research Council in 1952.
Khorana stayed in Vancouver for eight years, continuing his pioneering work on proteins and nucleic acids while raising two daughters, Julia Elizabeth and Emily Anne, and a son, Dave Roy. In 1960, he went to the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where he became co-director of the Institute for Enzyme Research.
It was at Wisconsin that Khorana and his colleagues worked out the mechanisms by which RNA codes for the synthesis of proteins, leading to the Nobel Prize in 1968, shared with Robert Holley of Cornell University and Marshall Nirenberg of the National Institutes of Health. Khorana was among the pioneers of the now-familiar series of three-nucleotide codons that signal to the cell which amino acids use in building proteins.
In 1970 he joined MIT, where he continued at the forefront of the ballooning field of genetics.
Shortly after arriving at the Institute, Khorana — along with colleagues — announced the synthesis of two different genes crucial to protein building. In a major breakthrough in 1976, they managed to complete the synthesis of the first fully functional manmade gene in a living cell. This method made possible controlled, systematic studies of how genetic structure influences function.
In the decades that followed, Khorana became interested in other cellular components, including biomembranes and in the visual system, rhodopsin — the pigment on the eye's retina that is responsible for the first step in the biological perception of light. He retired from the MIT faculty in 2007.

                                                                     Prof. John Kurakar