09/01/2026
The man who helped us understand the language god used to create us
The correct date of medicine laureate Har Gobind Khorana's birth is not known, but it is recorded as 9 January 1922 in documents. Khorana was born in a little village in Punjab named Raipur. His father was a village agricultural taxation clerk in the British Indian system of government. Although poor, his father was dedicated to educating his children and they were practically the only literate family in the village inhabited by about 100 people.
Despite poor educational facilities, Khorana completed high school and went on to receive bachelor's and master's degrees in chemistry from University of the Punjab in Lahore. In 1945, Khorana moved to the University of Liverpool, UK, under a Government of India Fellowship where he obtained a PhD in 1948.
Khorana spent a postdoctoral year (1948-1949) at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule in Zurich, before he moved to Cambridge for two years. A job offer in 1952 from Dr. Gordon M. Shrum of British Columbia took him to Vancouver, where Khorana worked in the field of biologically interesting phosphate esters and nucleic acids. His work ultimately took him to the United States and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
However, it was during his time at the University of Wisconsin-Madison that Khorana did his Nobel Prize-awarded work on the genetic code. Khorana shared the 1968 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Marshall Nirenberg and Robert Holley "for their interpretation of the genetic code and its function in protein synthesis."
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