The Google Doodle for January 9th celebrates Har Gobind Khorana, the Indian-American biochemist, on what would have been his 96th birthday. He is most famous for his Nobel Prize-winning research on how the genetic code of a cell, or the order of nucleotides in nucleic acids, control the cell’s synthesis of proteins.
Who is Har Gobind Khorana?
Har Gobind Khorana was born on the 9th of January 1922 in a village called Raipur in Punjab, now part of Pakistan. He lived in India until 1945 when he was awarded a Government of India Fellowship. This allowed Khorana to travel to the UK and study for a Ph.D at the University of Liverpool where Roger J. S. Beer supervised his research.
Dr. Khorana then spent time at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule in Zurich with Professor Vladimir Prelog, returned to India for a brief period and then back to England where his interest in proteins and nucleic acids came to fruition in Cambridge.
In 1952, a job offer took Dr. Khorana to Vancouver, British Columbia, where he worked with Dr. Gordon M. Shrum, Dr. Jack Campbell and Dr. Gordon M. Tener on the subject of phosphate esters and nucleic acids.
As the Google Doodle describes, it was at the University of Wisconsin that he and two others received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1968 for discovering that the order of nucleotides in our DNA determines which amino acids are built and in turn, the proteins that are created for essential cell functions.
Dr. Khorana is also renowned for constructing the first synthetic gene and received a multitude of awards during his lifetime, including the National Medal of Science.
Today’s Google Doodle was created by Bangalore-based illustrator Rohan Dahotre and celebrates Dr. Khorana’s work in DNA.
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