All you need to know about Har Gobind Khorana, the Nobel Laureate honoured by Google Doodle

Wednesday January 10, 2018 , 2 min Read

Har Gobind Khorana was born in Punjab (now Pakistan), into the only literate family in the village. Taught by his father to read and write, he rose up to become a Nobel Laureate and the first person to construct an artificial gene. Google paid tribute to the man with a doodle to celebrate his 96th birthday.

Har Gobind was born in Raipur in 1922 to a father who was passionate about education and taught all his five children to read and write.

Fascinated by science since childhood, Har Gobind completed his schooling from a school in Multan that gathered under the tree. He finished his Masters in Chemistry from Punjab University, Lahore in the year 1945.

After his PG, Har Gobind received a scholarship from the British ruled India to pursue PhD at the University of Liverpool, England according to Al Jazeera. After a doctorate in Organic Chemistry, he went to Zurich to work with Professor Vladimir Prelog. It was Vladimir who acted as a mentor and further molder his love for science.

After a few years, Har Gobind went to work in a university in Vancouver, Canada where he initiated his DNA research.

In 1960, he moved to the US and started working in the University of Wisconsin and was granted American citizenship in 1966.

Har Gobind received the Nobel Prize in the field of medicine for his work on understanding and interpreting genetic code and how it functions in protein synthesis. He received it in 1968 along with Robert Holley and Marshall Nirenberg. According to Vox, Har Gobind's friend and a professor at MIT - Uttam L. RajBhandary told about him,

“He was not influenced by its difficulty or the time needed to solve it, as long as it was of fundamental importance.”

Apart from the Nobel Prize, Har Gobind also received the National Medal of Science and the Lasker Award. He passed away on November 9, 2011 at the age 89 in Massachusetts.