Subrato Ghosh

Padma Vibhushan Late Dr Har Gobind Khorana (9 January 1922 – 9 November 2011) was the first person from India and also the Asian continent to receive the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (with two American biochemists M.W. Nirenberg and R. W. Holley). This was in the year 1968. The Award ceremony presentation speech mentioned: “…Together you have written the most exciting chapter in modern biology.”

Although Prof. Khorana rose to such prominence, served as faculty at MIT, one of the top academic institutions in world,hewas born into a small economically-poor village of north-western India (undivided) and was the son of an ordinary village agricultural tax collecting clerk.

An organic chemist-turned-molecular biologist and referred as the ‘Founding father of chemical biology’, Prof. Khorana confirmed that language or rule by which information in molecular sequence of DNA-encoded mRNA is translated into amino acid sequences of proteins, is composed of 64 distinct three-letter ‘words’, i.e., specific sequences of every three nucleotides in mRNA, that dictate the order of 20 possible amino acids in polypeptide chain. This triplet-nucleotide-based genetic code is common and fundamental to all forms of living organisms that use it to read the information in the DNA…Read more on NOPR