​​When Har Gobind Khorana passed away on 9 November 2011, Natu | The Nobel Prize

​​When Har Gobind Khorana passed away on 9 November 2011, Nature's obituary stated: "That someone with such a humble background could rise to become an icon of molecular biology is a testament to his extraordinary drive, discipline and striving for excellence."

Khorana was born in Raipur, a little village in Punjab, which is now part of eastern Pakistan. The correct date of his birth is not known; that shown in documents is 9 January 1922. His father was a village agricultural taxation clerk in the British Indian system of government. Although poor, his father was dedicated to educating his children and they were practically the only literate family in the village inhabited by about 100 people.

Despite poor educational facilities, Khorana completed high school and went on to receive bachelor's and master's degrees in chemistry from University of the Punjab in Lahore. In 1945, Khorana moved to the University of Liverpool, UK, under a Government of India Fellowship where he obtained a PhD in 1948.

Khorana spent a postdoctoral year (1948-1949) at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule in Zurich, before he moved to Cambridge for two years. A job offer in 1952 from Dr. Gordon M. Shrum of British Columbia took him to Vancouver, where Khorana worked in the field of biologically interesting phosphate esters and nucleic acids.

In 1960 Khorana moved to the Institute for Enzyme Research at the University of Wisconsin. He became a naturalised citizen of the United States. From 1970, Khorana was Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Biology and Chemistry at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Khorana shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1968 with Robert Holley and Marshall Nirenberg "for their interpretation of the genetic code and its function in protein synthesis."