22 Facts About Har Gobind Khorana

1. Har Gobind Khorana investigated mutations in rhodopsin that are associated with retinitis pigmentosa, which causes night blindness.

2. Har Gobind Khorana determined that some of the codons prompt the cell to start or stop the manufacture of proteins.

3. Har Gobind Khorana added details about which serial combinations of nucleotides form which specific amino acids.

4. In 1960 Har Gobind Khorana moved to the Institute for Enzyme Research at the University of Wisconsin.

5. Har Gobind Khorana is best known for his work cracking the genetic code.

6. Har Gobind Khorana made important contributions to this field by building different RNA chains with the help of enzymes.

7. Har Gobind Khorana wrote a biographical article, "A Life in Science", in Science.

8. Har Gobind Khorana performed the research on the genetic code for which he won the Nobel Prize at Wisconsin in the 1960s.

9. In 1960 Har Gobind Khorana moved to the Institute for Enzyme Research at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he became Professor of Biochemistry and co-director of the Institute.

10. Har Gobind Khorana was the youngest of five children born to Hindu parents in Raipur, a village of about 100 people in Punjab, India, which is part of West Pakistan.

11. In 1968 Har Gobind Khorana shared the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology with Robert W Holley and Marshall W Nirenberg (1927—) "for their interpretation of the genetic code and its function in protein synthesis.

12. Har Gobind Khorana was the first scientist to synthesize strings of nucleotides.

13. Har Gobind Khorana confirmed Nirenberg's finding that the arrangement of the four types of nucleotides on the DNA molecule determines the chemical composition and function of new cells; he then built on this finding and determined the nucleotide combinations that form specific amino acids.

14. Har Gobind Khorana was born in Raipur on January 9, 1922.

15. Har Gobind Khorana was an Indian organic chemist and cowinner of the 1968 Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine.

16. In 1966, Har Gobind Khorana was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

17. Har Gobind Khorana devised the methods that led to the synthesis of large, well-defined nucleic acids.

18. In 1955, Har Gobind Khorana learned about Severo Ochoa's discovery of the enzyme polynucleotide phosphorylase and met Arthur Kornberg, who described pioneering research on the enzymatic synthesis of DNA.

19. Har Gobind Khorana found that this reagent was very useful in overcoming problems in the synthesis of polynucleotides.

20. Har Gobind Khorana died on 9 November 2011, in Concord, Massachusetts, at the age of 89.

21. 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.

22. Har Gobind Khorana lived in British India until 1945, when he moved to England to study organic chemistry at the University of Liverpool on a Government of India Fellowship.