Har Gobind Khorana (1968 Nobel Laureate in Medicine)
 
 

Personal Info:

-born of Hindu parents in Raipur, a little village in Punjab, which is now part of west Pakistan
-correct date of birth is unknown but documents say January 9th, 1922
-youngest of family of 1 daughter and 4 sons
-father was a village agricultural taxation clerk in the British Indian system of government
- although poor father dedicated to educating his children and they were practically the onlt literate people in the village...
-attended high school in India and eventually attended the Punjab University in Lahore (M. Sc. degree)

 For more information click here:
H. G. Khorana

Experimental research was performed over a period of 15 years which included work at both the University of British Columbia and the Institute for Enzyme Research of Wisconsin... not including post doctoral work and early research in England.

The artical "Polynucleotide Synthesis and the Genetic Code"  draws upon a number of dicoveries made during the 1950's and early 1960's from a variety of disciplines.. biology.. genetics... biochem... physics, etc.

Chemical structure of nucleic acids became known in early 1950's.  Thought of possible laboratory synthesis in the field, ie. put together nucleosides and nucleotides to form internucleotide linkages of the type normally found in naturally occuring nucleic acids.  Problems encountered...

1. 1  activation of the phosphomonoester group of a mononucleotide so as to phosphorylate the hydroxyl group of another
2. 2  design of a suitable protecting groups for the various functional groups (primary and secondary hydroxyl groups in the sugar rings, amino groups in the purine and pyrimidine rings, etc.
3. 3  development of methods for the polymerization of mononucleotides and for the separation and characterization of the resulting polynucleotides
4. 4  evaluation of approaches to the stepwise synthesis of ploynucleotides of specific sequences

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Can chemical synthesis make a contribution to the study of the fundamental process of information flow, DNA...RNA...Protein?

Genetic Code

 at time basically only experimental approach was that of direct correlation of the sequence of a nucleic acid with that of a protein, coded by this nucleic acid....

Crick et al. deduced the three letter property of the genetic code by an ingenious application of the frame shift mutation...
getting directly at the coding problem.....

experimental approach at "cracking" code Matthaei and Nirenberg polyphenylalanine experiment

For more info click here... Genetic Code