Dr. Hargovind Khurana: Pioneering Geneticist and Nobel Laureate

Dr. Hargovind Khurana
⬧ Dr. Hargovind Khurana was born on January 9, 1922 in a town called Raipur (District Multan, Punjab) of undivided India.
⬧ After completing his M.Sc from Panjab University, he went to England for higher studies and there he completed his thesis under the guidance of Professor M. Robertson at the University of Liverpool and obtained his doctorate.
⬧ After some time, the Government of India once again awarded him a research scholarship and he got an opportunity to do research work with Professor V. Prelog at the Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich (Switzerland).
⬧ He had the opportunity to work with Nobel laureate Professor Alexander Todd at the University of Cambridge in England.
⬧ In the year 1952, Khorana was appointed Chairman of the Department of Bio-Chemistry, British Columbia Research Council, Vancouver (Canada).
⬧ In the year 1960, Dr. Khurana was given the position of Professor at the University of Wisconsin, USA and in 1966 he acquired American citizenship.
⬧ Dr. Khurana studied the chemical composition of the nuclei of living cells.
⬧ In the year 1960s, Khurana confirmed this discovery of D.N.Nirenberg and told that the way the four different types of nucleotides are arranged on the spiral 'ladder' of the molecule determines the chemical structure and function of the new cell.
⬧ Khurana explained which sequential combination of nucleotides make up which particular amino acid.
⬧ According to Dr. Khurana, the nucleotide code is always transmitted to the cell in groups of three, which are called codons. He also discovered that certain proteins prompt the cell to start or stop making proteins.
⬧ The subject of Dr. Khurana's study was the extremely complex basic chemical structures of subsets called nucleotides. By combining these aggregates, Dr. Khurana succeeded in making compounds called 'Nucleoproteid enzymes' of two important classes.
⬧ Dr. Hargovind Khurana was an Indian-American scientist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1968 for demonstrating the role of nucleotides in protein synthesis.
⬧ Dr. Khurana made another contribution to genetics in the year 1970, when he and his research team succeeded in synthesizing the first artificial copy of a yeast gene.
⬧ The Government of India honored Dr. Khurana with the Padma Bhushan Award in the year 1969.
⬧ To honor Dr. Khurana's work in the field of medicine, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Government of India and Indo-US Science and Technology Forum have jointly started the Khurana Program in 2007.
⬧ Dr. Khurana died on November 9, 2011 in Massachusetts, USA.