DrHar Gobind Khorana

Har Gobind Khorana's life began about as far from a Nobel ceremony as a life can begin, and ended with his name attached to the founding act of an entire industry. He was born on 9 January 1922 in Raipur, a small village in the Punjab that now lies in Pakistan, into a poor Hindu family. His father was a village patwari — a clerk in the British colonial system who kept the agricultural land and tax records — and though the family had almost no money, his father placed a fierce value on schooling. Khorana later recalled, without exaggeration, that theirs was practically the only literate family in a village of perhaps a hundred people, and that his earliest lessons were held out of doors, the children seated under a tree.

Scholarship after scholarship

There was no path out of that village except academic excellence, and Khorana had it in abundance. Scholarships carried him from the village school to Punjab University in Lahore, where he took his bachelor's and master's degrees in chemistry. A fellowship from the Government of India then sent him abroad, to the University of Liverpool, for a doctorate — a passage that took a poor Punjabi student, at a time of war and then of Partition, into the laboratories of Britain. Postdoctoral years followed in Zurich and then at Cambridge, where he worked on nucleic acids and proteins and began to find his true subject. It was a scientific formation assembled piece by piece across three countries by a man who, at several points, had no money and no secure position to return to, and whose home region was, during these very years, being torn apart by the violence of Partition.

Vancouver, Wisconsin, and the genetic code

Positions in Canada, at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, and then in the United States, at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, gave Khorana at last the stability and the resources to do great work — and he did. It was at Wisconsin, through the late 1950s and 1960s, that he made the contribution for which he is remembered: helping to crack the genetic code. Scientists had established that DNA carried the instructions for building proteins, but not how those instructions were read. Khorana's meticulous chemical work helped establish that the four-letter alphabet of DNA is read three letters at a time, and that each such triplet — each "codon" — specifies a particular amino acid, the building blocks of proteins. He worked out how the sequence of the code governs the synthesis of proteins that carry out the cell's functions. For this, in 1968, he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Marshall Nirenberg and Robert Holley.

The first synthetic gene

Most scientists would have rested on a Nobel. Khorana instead moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1970 and set his laboratory an even more audacious goal. In the early 1970s his team achieved the first total chemical synthesis of a gene — assembling a complete, functional gene from bottled laboratory chemicals, nucleotide by nucleotide, and a few years later demonstrating that such a synthetic gene could function inside a living cell. It was, in effect, the founding act of what became genetic engineering, synthetic biology, and the entire biotechnology industry. The tools and concepts Khorana pioneered underlie the gene synthesis that today produces medicines, vaccines and engineered organisms.

The man at the bench

Those who worked with him describe a scientist of almost monastic habits: intensely private, indifferent to fame, uninterested in administration or publicity, and happiest at the laboratory bench, where he kept graduate students and postdoctoral researchers working beside him for decades. He avoided the celebrity that his Nobel could have brought and rarely spoke about himself. He became a naturalised United States citizen and spent the rest of his career at MIT.

Why the Roll remembers him

Har Gobind Khorana died in Concord, Massachusetts, in 2011, at the age of eighty-nine. His life is perhaps the most improbable ascent on this entire Roll: from a village so poor it was almost entirely unlettered, from lessons under a tree, from a family clinging to literacy in colonial Punjab, to a Nobel Prize and the invention of the technology that lets humans read and write the molecule of life itself. He belongs here as the diaspora's proof of the widest possible reach of Indian scientific talent — that it could rise not from the elite institutions and comfortable homes that produced many of his peers, but from the very bottom of the rural social order, and end by writing, quite literally, in the alphabet of life. No résumé better rebukes the idea that genius requires the right postcode. The boy who learned his letters under a tree spent his life spelling out the code that builds every living thing.

A second scientific life

The Nobel and the synthetic gene would have been enough for most careers, but at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Khorana opened an entirely new line of research, spending the last decades of his working life on the biochemistry of vision — the intricate chemistry of rhodopsin, the light-sensitive protein in the eye that converts light into the signals the brain reads as sight. It was a fitting late subject for a man who had spent his life illuminating molecular mechanisms, and it produced a second substantial body of work far removed from the genetic code that made him famous.

The legacy of the village boy

Khorana remained, to the end, intensely private and indifferent to celebrity, avoiding interviews and honours ceremonies and preferring the company of his laboratory. But his name lives on in a way that reaches back toward the village he came from: the Khorana Program, an exchange fellowship that sends young scientists between India and the United States, was created in his honour and continues to carry Indian students into American laboratories, a deliberate echo of the scholarships that once carried him. Institutions across Punjab bear his name. When he died in 2011, the tributes dwelt on the sheer improbability of the arc — from lessons under a tree in a village so poor it was almost entirely unlettered, to a Nobel Prize and the invention of the tools that let humanity read and write the molecule of life. No life on this Roll better rebukes the notion that scientific genius requires the right birth; Khorana's began at the very bottom of colonial India's rural order and ended in the alphabet of life itself.