He was a molecular biologist and an Indian- the scientist who was pointed out to us when I was doing M.Sc. He had of course won the Nobel Prize also. The work that he did was truly pioneering. He devised the methodology to string individual nucleotides to create an oligonucleotide. This was important because scientists were trying to figure out the genetic code. The DNA is made of four kinds of nucleotides: A, G, T, and C. Their arrangement is critical. Three nucleotides together define one amino acid. Strings of amino acid make a protein. The other way to think about this is that the nucleotide are alphabets. So if you had a soup of alphabets: T, H, A, E, F, O, X, and N, this could be rearranged to say:
THE FOX ATE THE HEN
Similarly, A, G, T, and C can be arranged to make cellular sense. So for example, if ATG occurs, then it means methionine. But if is written as AGT then it means serine. This is what Khorana figured out through a series of elegant experiments. And for this he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1968.
When I moved to the University of Virginia, I did my first rotation with Mark Braiman, who incidentally had done post-doctoral work with Har Gobind Khorana. By then Khorana had moved on to understanding the role of rhodopsin amongst other things. They were using vibrational spectroscopy to map the conformational changes. It was very interesting but it was simply too much mathematics and physics for me and so even though Mark wanted me to be in his lab, I decided not to join it. I knew my limitations.
THE FOX ATE THE HEN
Similarly, A, G, T, and C can be arranged to make cellular sense. So for example, if ATG occurs, then it means methionine. But if is written as AGT then it means serine. This is what Khorana figured out through a series of elegant experiments. And for this he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1968.
When I moved to the University of Virginia, I did my first rotation with Mark Braiman, who incidentally had done post-doctoral work with Har Gobind Khorana. By then Khorana had moved on to understanding the role of rhodopsin amongst other things. They were using vibrational spectroscopy to map the conformational changes. It was very interesting but it was simply too much mathematics and physics for me and so even though Mark wanted me to be in his lab, I decided not to join it. I knew my limitations.
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