Dr. Har Gobind Khurana (89) who was awarded the 1968 Nobel Prize for Physiology/Medicine for his path-breaking work in Genetics passed away at Concorde, Massachusets, on 9th November 2011.
Dr.Khorana was born in Raipur, Punjab (now in Pakistan) on 9th January 1922.
Then, he spent a year at the Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich, on post-doctoral work and another two at Cambridge. He joined the University of British Columbia in 1952 and shifted to the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1960.
After receiving the Nobel Prize, he joined the Massachusets Institute of Technology in 1970 as Alfred Sloan Professor of Biology and Chemistry and continued there till his retirement in 2007.
Dr.Khorana is a recipient of several other awards and honours. In 1968 he was awarded the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize by Columbia University and the Lasker Foundation Award for Basic Medical Research. In 1974, he was honoured with the Willard Gibbs Medal of the American Chemical Society. In 1980, he received the Gairdner Foundation Annual Award; in 1987, he was honoured with the Paul Kayser International Award of Merit in Retina Research.
He was also a member of several prestigious international organisations like the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
In 2007, the Department of Biotechnology of the Government of India, The University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the Indo-US Science and Technology Forum set up the "Khorana Program" in honour of Dr.Khorana.
Dr.Khorana married Esther Elizabeth Sibler of Switzerland in 1952; she has predeceased him. Dr.Khurana is survived by Julia Elizabeth (1953) and Dave Roy (1958). Another daughter Emily Anne born in 1954 passed away in 1979.
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