Har Gobind Khorana, who rose from poverty in a small village in the Punjab to become one of the giants of modern biology, winning the Nobel Prize in 1968 for work at the University of Wisconsin, Madison that helped unravel the genetic code and explain how proteins are made, died Wednesday in Concord, Mass. He was 89.
Almost anyone studying biology today, "they may not know they are studying Khorana, but they are," said Andy Greene, director of the biotechnology and bioengineering center at the Medical College of Wisconsin.
"He discovered a process that's fundamental to life."
In 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick discovered the structure of DNA, the genetic material of living things, telling us where the information is held and what it looks like.
It was Khorana who showed how that genetic material is translated into the proteins that drive most human actions from thinking to breathing. This process is crucial to our understanding of disease.
Information in our DNA, Khorana showed, is read by something called transfer RNA and used to make proteins. Defective proteins are at the heart of many illnesses.
Khorana was awarded the 1968 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine (jointly with Robert W. Holley and Marshall W. Nirenberg) for his discoveries at UW, but the recognition did not signal the end of his groundbreaking work, as it does for many recipients. After moving to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1970, the professor worked with colleagues to synthesize two genes crucial to building proteins.
In 1976, his team synthesized the first completely functional man-made gene in a living cell, important work that paved the way for genetic engineering.
"That entire (development) is based on Gobind's chemistry," said Aseem Ansari, professor of biochemistry and genomics at UW. "Gobind was my inspiration."
As a young man, Ansari read some of Khorana's groundbreaking papers and found himself changed by them.
"His papers were so profound. It was a revelation," he recalled Friday. "You could actually wrestle with nature and wrest away some truths."
In the mid- to late 1990s Ansari, then a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard, met Khorana in an elevator. The young post-doc found himself tongue-tied in the presence of the great scientist.
Finally, the younger man regained his voice.
"I told him his work on biology changed my life," Ansari said. "I was going to do something else. But I was so impressed with the intellectual and scientific elegance of his work that I decided to pursue science instead."
Most remarkably, Khorana had started life in distinctly humble circumstances. Born in 1922, he was the youngest of five children, his father a poor village agricultural clerk.
His father was dedicated to education and Khorana earned a master's degree in science from Punjab University in Lahore. He left India in 1945, studying in Liverpool, then in Zurich, working for the British Columbia Research Council and eventually landing a job at UW in the biochemistry department.
In a long career that ended with his retirement from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2007, Khorana gained a reputation as an intense, yet humble man who set high standards for his students.
One story Ansari heard concerned a practice Khorana sometimes followed in his lab at MIT. According to legend, Khorana used to bring doughnuts to the lab. He knew the specific favorites of each post-doc and by observing which ones were missing on Monday he could tell who had come to work on the weekend.
In his honor, Ansari and Prof. Kenneth Shapiro established the Khorana Scholars Program at UW in 2007, a student exchange program between the university and Indian research institutions. In 2009, Khorana returned to UW for the last time when the university recognized his contribution to science with a symposium that attracted three other Nobel winners and 30 members of the National Academy of Sciences.
Khorana wrote back to the university after the symposium and the dedication of the Khorana Biochemistry Auditorium. He said, "these acts of kindness ... were truly overwhelming."
His note ended:
I wish you all success and good health.
Gobind
