Har Gobind Khorana | |
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Born |
Raipur,British India (now Raipur, Pakistan) |
9 January 1922
Died | 9 November 2011 Concord, Massachusetts, U.S. |
(aged 89)
Residence |
India United States United Kingdom |
Citizenship | United States, India |
Fields | Molecular biology |
Institutions |
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Alma mater | |
Known for | First to demonstrate the role of nucleotides in protein synthesis |
Notable awards | |
Signature |
Har Gobind Khorana(9 January 1922 – 9 November 2011), was an Indian-American biochemist who shared the 1968 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with Marshall W. Nirenberg and Robert W. Holley for research that showed how the order of nucleotides in nucleic acids, which carry the genetic code of the cell, control the cell’s synthesis of proteins. Khorana and Nirenberg were also awarded the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University in the same year.
Khorana was born in Raipur, British India (today Tehsil Kabirwala, Punjab, Pakistan) and later moved to become an Indian citizen after the partition of 1947. He served on the faculty of the University of British Columbia from 1952-1960, where he initiated his Nobel Prize winning work. He became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1966, and subsequently received the National Medal of Science. He co-directed the Institute for Enzyme Research, became a professor of biochemistry in 1962 and was named Conrad A. Elvehjem Professor of Life Sciences at University of Wisconsin–Madison. He served as MIT's Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Biology and Chemistry, Emeritus and was a member of the Board of Scientific Governors at The Scripps Research Institute.