Khorana, Har Gobind, 1922–2011, American biochemist, b. Raipur (now in Pakistan), Ph.D. Univ. of Liverpool, 1948. He became a U.S. citizen in 1966, and was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1970 to 2007. Khorana, Marshall W. Nirenberg, and Robert W. Holley were awarded the 1968 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for their discoveries concerning the genetic code and its function in protein synthesis. Khorana confirmed Nirenberg's finding that the arrangement of the four types of nucleotides on the DNA molecule (see nucleic acid) determines the chemical composition and function of new cells; he then built on this finding and determined the nucleotide combinations that form specific amino acids. Khorana was also the first scientist to synthesize strings of nucleotides.
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