H. Gobind KhoranaDied 9 Nov 2011 at age 89 (born 9 Jan 1922).Har Gobind Khorana was an Indian-American biochemist who shared (with Marshall W. Nirenberg and Robert W. Holley) the 1968 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine “for their interpretation of the genetic code and its function in protein synthesis.” After James Watson and Francis Crick announced the double helix structure of DNA in 1953, other researchers pursued how DNA's instructions were actually carried out. Khorana devised techniques to find more about the genetic code of small “messenger” molecules oftransferribonucleic acid(RNAs) and their codons which controlled protein building.In 1972, he was the first scientist to synthesize a wholly artificial gene from laboratory chemicals. In the 1980s, Khorana synthesized the gene for rhodopsin, a protein involved in vision.« |
