WIKIMEDIA COMMONS, TOM ELLENBERGER
Har Gobind Khorana, professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, won the Nobel Prize in 1968 along with Robert Holley and Marshall Nirenberg for discoveries leading to an understanding of how DNA encodes information needed to make proteins. He died earlier this month (November 9) of natural causes.
“He left an amazing trail of technical achievement,” Thomas Sakmar, a professor at Rockefeller University and a former student of Khorana’s told The New York Times.
Despite humble beginnings—his family was one of the only literate families in his village of about 100 people in Raipur (now Punjab), Pakistan, according to his Nobel Prize biography—he showed a talent for science and later earned a scholarship to study at the University of Liverpool, where he completed his ...
