Har Gobind Khorana

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Har Gobind Khorana

Har Gobind Khorana (* probably January 9, 1922 in Raipur, Punjab ( in what is now the Pakistani part ); † November 9, 2011 in Concord , Massachusetts ) was an Indian - American biochemist and molecular biologist . He is a Nobel Prize Winner in Physiology or Medicine .

In 1970, Khorana was the first to artificially synthesize a gene . He did essential work for the deciphering of the genetic code . Marshall Warren Nirenberg and Heinrich Matthaei laid the starting point for this with the basic poly-U experiment .

Life

Khorana was born in what was then British India . His birthplace is in the part of Punjab that is now part of Pakistan . His exact date of birth is not known; January 9, 1922 was later entered in the documents. He came from a Hindu family who had to flee the newly founded Muslim state of Pakistan after the partition of British India . Although the family was very poor, his father paid great attention to the education of his children, so that his family was practically the only one in town where everyone could read and write. After school education, Khorana studied at the University of the Punjab in Lahore and graduated with a master's degree (M.Sc.) . In 1945 he went to England on a scholarship to start a doctoral thesis at the University of Liverpool . After earning his doctorate ( Ph.D. ) in 1948, he worked for two years at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich with Vladimir Prelog and then for two years in Cambridge , where he focused primarily on research on nucleic acids and proteins . In 1952 he went to the University of British Columbia in Vancouver , where he continued his research on nucleic acids. In 1960 he moved to the University of Wisconsin – Madison . He became a US citizen in 1966 and has been Professor of Biology and Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) since 1970 .

Khorana was married to Esther Elizabeth Sibler († 2001) from 1952. The couple have two daughters and one son.

Scientific achievement

The most important achievement by Khoranas and co-workers lies in the deciphering of the genetic code. After Nirenberg and Matthaei had proven in their Poly-U experiment that the base sequence UCU codes for the amino acid serine and CUC for leucine , Khorana and his team synthesized many different messenger RNAs in a systematic sequence and were thus able to determine which base sequence for which Encoded amino acid. E.g.

UACUACUACUACUACUAC… → UAC UAC UAC , or ACU ACU ACU , or CUA CUA CUA , which corresponds to the amino acids tyrosine , threonine and leucine .

Khorana's research group also found that UAG , UAA , and UGA do not code for amino acids, but are so-called " stop codons ".

Many techniques in oligonucleotide synthesis still used today were developed in the Khorana group in the late 1950s and early 1960s (such as the use of protecting groups ).

With Kjell Kleppe and others, he laid the foundations of the later polymerase chain reaction (duplication of DNA segments with DNA polymerases) in an essay in 1971 .

Honors

In 1966, Khorana was elected to the National Academy of Sciences , 1967 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and 1973 to the American Philosophical Society . For his work, Khorana received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1968 together with Marshall Warren Nirenberg and Robert W. Holley . In the same year he was awarded the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research and the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize , and he also became a member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina . In 1969 he was awarded the second highest Indian state prize, the Padma Vibhushan . In 1980 Khorana received a Gairdner Foundation International Award , and in 1987 the National Medal of Science .

literature

Web links

Commons : Har Gobind Khorana  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Denise Gellene: H. Gobind Khorana, 89, Nobel-Winning Scientist, this . In: The New York Times . November 14, 2011.
  2. ↑ Gisela Baumgart: Khorana, Har Gobind. In: Werner E. Gerabek , Bernhard D. Haage, Gundolf Keil , Wolfgang Wegner (eds.): Enzyklopädie Medizingeschichte. De Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2005, ISBN 3-11-015714-4 , pp. 733 f .; here: p. 733.
  3. ↑ a b Information from the Nobel Foundation on the award ceremony in 1968 to Har Gobind Khorana (English)
  4. ↑ Schaller, Weimann, Lerch, Khorana, Study of Polynucleotides XXIV, The stepwise synthesis of selected Deoxyribopolynucleotides. Protected derivatives of deoxypolynucleosides and new synthesis of Deoxyribonucleoside-3´´- Phosphates, J. Am. Chem. Soc., 85, 1963, 3821-27
  5. ↑ Hogrefe, A short history of oligonucleotide synthesis, pdf ( Memento from February 22, 2014 in the Internet Archive )
  6. ^ K. Kleppe, E. Ohtsuka, R. Kleppe, I. Molineux, HG Khorana: Studies on polynucleotides. XCVI. Repair replications of short synthetic DNA's as catalyzed by DNA polymerases . In: J Mol Biol . tape 56 , no. 2 , March 14, 1971, p. 341-361 , doi : 10.1016 / 0022-2836 (71) 90469-4 , PMID 4927950 (English).
  7. ↑ Book of Members 1780 – present, Chapter K. (PDF; 670 kB) In: American Academy of Arts and Sciences (amacad.org). Accessed March 11, 2018 (English).
  8. ^ Member History: HG Khorana. American Philosophical Society, accessed October 23, 2018 .
  9. ↑ The Lasker Foundation: H. Gobind Khorana and Marshall Nirenberg - For their contributions toward deciphering the genetic code.
  10. ^ The Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize for Biology or Biochemistry: Past Recipients of the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize
  11. ^ Member entry by H. Gobind Khorana at the German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina , accessed on October 12, 2012.
  12. ↑ Canada Gairdner International Awardees: H. Gobind Khorana .
  13. ^ The President's National Medal of Science: Har Gobind Khorana .
personal data
SURNAME Khorana, Har Gobind
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Indian-American molecular biologist
DATE OF BIRTH January 9, 1922
PLACE OF BIRTH Raipur , Chhattisgarh , India
DATE OF DEATH November 9, 2011
Place of death Concord , Massachusetts