Har Gobind Khorana – Wikipedia

December 22, 2025

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Har_Gobind_Khorana

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During his tenure at this university, he completed the work that led to sharing the Nobel Prize in 1968. The Nobel web site states that it was “for their interpretation of the genetic code and its function in protein synthesis”. Har Gobind Khorana’s role is stated as follows: he “made important contributions to this field by building different RNA chains with the help of enzymes. Using these enzymes, he was able to produce proteins. ….

Their Nobel lecture was delivered on 12 December 1968.[24] Khorana was the first scientist to chemically synthesize oligonucleotides.[25] This achievement, in the 1970s, was also the world’s first synthetic gene; in later years, the process has become widespread.[22] Subsequent scientists referred to his research while advancing genome editing with the CRISPR/Cas9 system.[21]

After years of work, he was the first in the world to complete the total synthesis of a functional gene outside a living organism in 1972.[10] He did this by extending the above to long DNA polymers using non-aqueous chemistry and assembled these into the first synthetic gene, using polymerase and ligase enzymes that link pieces of DNA together,[25] as well as methods that anticipated the invention of polymerase chain reaction (PCR).[26]

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