HARGOBIND KHORANA - Indian Nobel Prize

INDIAN NOBEL LAUREATES

                                                                                                                                 HARGOBIND

                                                                                                                                       KHORANA
                                                                                                                                      (1922-1996)

                He was born into a poor family in Raipur, Punjab (now in Pakistan). He attended Punjab University at Lahore and the University of Liverpool, England, on government scholarships. He obtained his Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Liverpool in 1948.  HE began his research  on nucleic acids during a fellowship at Cambridge University in 1951. He held fellowships and professorships in Switzerland at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and the universities of British Columbia, Canada and Wisconsin, USA. His major breakthrough in the field of medicine was interpreting the genetic code and analysing its function in protein synthesis. He shared the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1968 with Marshall W. Nirenberg and Robert W. Holley. Working independently of one another, all three made contributions to the understanding of the genetic code and how it works in a cell.