Har Gobind Khorana, an organic chemist who specialized in the study of proteins and nucleic acids, shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology of Medicine with Robert W. Holley (1922- ) and Marshall W. Nirenberg (1927- ) in 1968 for discoveries related to the genetic code and its function in protein synthesis. In addition to developing methods for investigating the structure of the nucleic acids, Khorana introduced many of the techniques that allowed scientists to decipher the genetic code and show how ribonucleic acid (RNA) can specify the structure of proteins. Four years after winning the Nobel Prize, Khorana succeeded in synthesizing the first wholly artificial gene. In the 1980s Khorana synthesized the gene for rhodopsin, a protein involved in vision.

Har Gobind Khorana, youngest of the five children of Shri Ganput Rai Khorana and Shrimat Krishna Devi Khorana, was born in Raipur, in the Punjab region of India (now part of...