Har Gobind Khorana

Har Gobind Khorana, born in 1922, American geneticist and Nobel laureate. Khorana was born in Raipur, India. He received a B.S. degree in 1943 and an M.Sc. degree in 1945, both from the University of Punjab. He received a doctorate in chemistry from the University of Liverpool in 1948. During the next 12 years he held posts at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich, Switzerland, the University of Cambridge, the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, and the Rockefeller Institute (now Rockefeller University) in New York City. In 1960 he joined the Enzyme Institute at the University of Wisconsin, eventually becoming its codirector.

Khorana was a cowinner of the 1968 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for independent studies of how genes within a cell determine the function of that cell. In 1970 he became the Alfred P. Sloan professor of biology and chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. See also Nucleic Acids.