A tribute to a Great Biochemist 'Har Gobind Khorana' on his Birth Centenary Year 2022

This Conference is being conducted to mark the year 2022 as Birth centenary of Nobel Laureate Dr. Har Gobind Khorana. Dr. Khorana, an Indian-American biochemist was born in 1922 as the youngest of five children in the small village of Raipur, India, and with his sheer hard work went onto win the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1968. Khorana lived in British India until 1945, when he moved to England to study organic chemistry at the University of Liverpool on a Government of India Fellowship. He received his PhD in 1948 under the supervision of Roger J. S. Beer. The following year, he pursued postdoctoral studies with Professor Vladimir Prelog at ETH Zurich in Switzerland. He began research on nucleic acids during a fellowship at the University of Cambridge (1951) under Sir Alexander Todd. Dr. Khorana conducted research at various universities in England, Switzerland, Canada and USA, and it was at the University of Wisconsin that he and two fellow researchers received the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1968. Together, they discovered that the order of nucleotides in our DNA determines which amino acids are built. These amino acids form proteins, which carry out essential cell functions. His accomplishments didn’t stop there. Fewer than five years later, Dr. Khorana made a second scientific breakthrough when he constructed the first synthetic gene. He received a host of awards during his lifetime, including the National Medal of Science.