Editorial Har Gobind Khorana Passes Away

In 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick unravelled the structure of DNA, the genetic material of living things. But it was Har Gobind Khorana who showed how that genetic material is translated into the proteins that drive most human activities. He showed that information in our DNA is read by something called transfer RNA and this information is then used to make proteins. Khorana won the Nobel in 1968, sharing it with Marshall W. Nirenberg and Robert W. Holley, for unraveling the nucleotide sequence of RNA and deciphering the genetic code. Har Gobind Khorana, the American biochemist who rose from poverty in a small village in the Punjab of undivided India EDITOR to become one of the giants of modern biology, passed HASAN JAWAID KHAN away recently in Concord, Massachusetts at the age of 89. ASSOCIATE EDITOR Born on 9 January 1922 in the village of Raipur in DR. VINEETA SINGHAL Punjab (now in Pakistan), Khorana was the youngest of a family of one daughter and four sons. His father was a PRODUCTION OFFICERS patwari, a village agricultural taxation clerk in the KAUSHAL KISHORE government of British India. Despite his poverty, Khorana’s ASHWANI KUMAR BRAHMI father strived to educate his children – they were the only literate family in the village inhabited by about 100 ART & LAYOUT people. NEERU SHARMA Har Gobind Khorana attended the D.A.V. High School in Multan (now West Punjab) and ultimately SENIOR SALES & obtained his MSc degree from the Punjab University in DISTRIBUTION OFFICER Lahore. He counted Ratan Lal, one of his teachers in the LOKESH KUMAR CHOPRA school, and Mahan Singh his supervisor during his MSc years, as the greatest influences during that period. ADVERTISEMENT OFFICER In 1945, Khorana was awarded the Government of PARVEZ ALI KHAN India Fellowship that made it possible for him to go to England and study for a PhD degree at the University of Liverpool. Khorana spent a postdoctoral year (1948-1949) at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule in Zurich with Professor Vladimir Prelog who moulded his thought and philosophy towards science. In 1949, Khorana moved to Cambridge where he had obtained a fellowship to work with Prof. G. W. Kenner and Prof. A. R. Todd. He stayed in Cambridge from 1950 till 1952. It was here that Khorana’s interest in both proteins and nucleic acids took root. Married in 1952 to Esther Elizabeth Sibler, of Swiss origin, Khorana moved to Vancouver in Canada in 1952 where he worked at the British Columbia Research Council. Here he spent eight years, carrying out work on proteins and nucleic acids before moving in 1960 to the University of Wisconsin at Madison in the US, where he became co-director of the Institute for Enzyme Research. It was his work here on the RNA codes for synthesis of proteins that led to the Nobel Prize in 1968. However, Khorana, who had become a naturalised citizen of the United States in 1966, did not slow down on his research work. In 1970, he moved on to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and worked with colleagues to synthesize two genes crucial to building proteins. In 1976, his team synthesized the first completely functional man-made gene in a living cell, an important work that COVER DESIGN paved the way for genetic engineering. NEERU SHARMA Khorana will always be remembered as a scientist who revolutionised biochemistry with his pioneering work in DNA chemistry. Hasan Jawaid Khan

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