25 facts about Har Gobind Khorana- Created First Synthetic Human gene

Har Gobind Khorana was born in Raipur, Punjab, (now in Pakistan) on 9 January 1922.
His father was a patwari, a village agricultural taxation clerk in the British-Indian system of government.
Har Gobind Khorana did his schooling from the D.A.V. High School in Multan.
Soon he received his B.Sc.(1943) and M.Sc.(1945) degrees from the Punjab University in Lahore.

Har Gobind Khorana lived in India until 1945. Soon the award of a Government of India Fellowship made it possible for him to go to England and he studied for a Ph. D. degree at the University of Liverpool.
In 1945, he moved to England to study organic chemistry at the University of Liverpool on a Government of India Fellowship.
Har Gobind Khorana spent a postdoctoral year (1948-1949) at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule in Zurich.

Professional Life and Research Work

In 1949, he returned to India but was unable to find a job, so he returned back to England.
Later he joined Cambridge University, England in 1950 and he worked with Professors G.W. Kenner and Lord A.R. Todd.
Har Gobind Khorana married Esther Elizabeth Sibler in 1952. Soon they had had three children, Julia Elizabeth, Emily Anne, and Dave Roy.
In 1952 he went to the University of British Columbia, Vancouver,Canada. The British Columbia Research Council offered at that time very little by way of facilities, but there was ‘all the freedom in the world’, to do what the researcher liked to do.
In 1960 Har Gobind Khorana accepted a position as co-director of the Institute for Enzyme Research at the Institute for Enzyme Research at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
Soon he became a professor of biochemistry in 1962 and was named Professor of Life Sciences at Wisconsin–Madison.
Later he became a US citizen in 1966.

During his tenure at this University, he completed the work that led to sharing the Nobel prize
Dr. Har Gobind Khorana shared the Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology in 1968 with Marshall Nirenberg and Robert Holley for cracking the genetic code.
The genetic code is the biological language common to all living organisms. This language is spelled out in three-letter words with each set of three nucleotides codes for a specific amino acid.
He became the Alfred Sloan Professor of Biology and Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1970.
Beginning in 1970, Khorana was the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Biology and Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Later, he became the member of the Board of Scientific Governors at The Scripps Research Institute.
He retired from MIT in 2007.
Dr. Khorana was also the first to synthesize oligonucleotides (strings of nucleotides).
Today, oligonucleotides are indispensable tools in biotechnology, widely used in biology labs for sequencing, cloning and genetic engineering.
Khorana has won many awards and honors for his achievements, amongst them the Padma Vibhushan, Membership of the National Academy of Sciences, USA as well as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Har Gobind Khorana died on 9 November 2011, in Concord, Massachusetts, at the age of 89

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