LP HOT NEWS: Who Is Har Gobind Khorana

January 9, 2018.

People celebrity news.

Who Is Har Gobind Khorana?

Har Gobind Khorana is being honored with a Google Doodle Tuesday, on what would have been Khorana’s 96th birthday.

So Who Is Har Gobind Khorana? Why Google Is Celebrating the Nobel Prize-Winner?

Har Gobind Khorana (January 9, 1922 – November 9, 2011) was an Indian American biochemist.

He shared the 1968 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with Marshall W. Nirenberg and Robert W. Holley for research that showed how the order of nucleotides in nucleic acids, which carry the genetic code of the cell, control the cell’s synthesis of proteins. Khorana and Nirenberg were also awarded the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University in the same year.

After the middle of the 1970s, his lab studied the biochemistry of bacteriorhodopsin, a membrane protein that converts light energy into chemical energy by creating a proton gradient. Later, his lab went on to study the structurally related visual pigment known as rhodopsin.

A summary of his work was provided by a former colleague at the University of Wisconsin. "Khorana was an early practitioner, and perhaps a founding father, of the field of chemical biology. He brought the power of chemical synthesis to bear on deciphering the genetic code, relying on different combinations of trinucleotides."

On 9 January 2018, the worldwide Google network paid homage to the researcher, citing his Nobel prize award and National Medal of Science (1987). The latter was presented for "his innovative contributions that significantly contributed to our understanding of gene structure, membrane function and vision."

The illustration of Har Gobind Khorana's likeness depicted his use of three-letter combinations to represent the four chemical bases found in RNA. According to the Washington Post, "Dr. Khorana confirmed the belief that the code is transmitted by separate and distinct three-letter “words” and found the precise order of the nucleotides within each triplet".