Khorana died of natural causes on November 9, 2011 in Concord, Massachusetts. He was 89. His wife died in 2001. Their daughter Emily Anne died in 1979. A widower, he was survived by his children Julia and Dave.
Har Gobind Khorana (January 9, 1922 – November 9, 2011) was an Indian-born American biochemist who shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1968 with Marshall W. Nirenberg and Robert W. Holley for research that helped to show how the nucleotides in nucleic acids, which carry the genetic code of the cell, control the cell's synthesis of proteins. He even devised a method to make several copies of DNA, which he termed “Repair Synthesis” that was later rediscovered by Kary Mullis and named as Polymerase Chain Reaction or PCR.
"Khorana was among the pioneers of the now-familiar series of three-nucleotide codons that signal to the cell which amino acids to use in building proteins - for example, uracil-cytosine-uracil, or UCU, codes for the amino acid serine, while CUC codes for leucine," said MIT News.
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