Remembering Khorana and his bright peers

February 04, 2022

Har Gobind Khorana - Memorial Symposium on Genes, Genomes & Membrane Biology - Abstract Book

 

 

 

 

Nobel laureate Har Gobind Khorana, whose birth centenary is being celebrated this year, was an alumnus of Government College, Lahore. Among his classmates was Nityanand, who reached St John’s College in Cambridge on the Govt of India Overseas Fellowship in 1948. Two mathematics students of the Lahore college, Abdus Salam and RP Bambah, were at St John’s College too when Khorana also reached Cambridge. Salam was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in 1979.

Nobel laureate Har Gobind Khorana (1922-2011) is being globally remembered for his huge contribution towards discovering an essential function of our DNA, and, thereafter, for constructing the first synthetic gene. Popular writings on Khorana recall his doctoral study on the Indian Government Fellowship at the University of Liverpool and his disappointment at failing to secure a job on his return to India in 1949.

When Khorana left Lahore, India’s freedom appeared imminent. He completed his PhD in organic chemistry in 1948 and returned after spending a year at his own expense at Dr Vladimir Prelog’s laboratory in Eidgenoessische Technische Hochschule (ETH), Zurich. In India, he applied for a position at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI), but it went to another candidate who had also studied abroad.

While he was in India, he received an offer to work in Prof Alexander Todd’s laboratory at Cambridge, UK, due to an input given to him by George Kenner, a visitor from Cambridge at the ETH. He, therefore, took up the Cambridge offer.

One of Khorana’s BSc classmates at Government College, Lahore (GCL), Dr Nityanand, also reached St John’s College in Cambridge under the Government of India Overseas Fellowship scheme in 1948 and enrolled to do his second PhD under Prof Todd. Nityanand had done his first PhD in 1948 with Dr K Venkataraman in Bombay. It is another coincidence that two mathematics students of GCL — Abdus Salam (Nobel laureate in physics, 1979) and Ram Prakash Bambah — were also at St John’s College when Khorana reached Cambridge. In terms of the university results at different stages in Lahore, Salam was the numero uno among them, but for the one distinction that Bambah had of having scored 600 out of 600 in the MA (mathematics) examination in 1945.

Bambah has often recalled that Khorana was anguished. He had told them in Cambridge that “Main te apni chapplan ghisa ke aa gya haan, tusi vee ja ke tamasha dekho.” Bambah would have fully understood the import of this bitter remark as there was no teaching job for him in GCL in 1946. The ICS examination had been discontinued in India after 1943. Bambah had to be content with a research scholarship under his mathematics teacher, with whom he co-authored nine papers in a year. Luckily for him, an opportunity emerged of a temporary teaching position in physics at Delhi University. In Delhi, he obtained the Exhibition Fellowship with the support of Prof DS Kothari. He proceeded to St John’s College in 1948 — where Salam had gone earlier on a scholarship provided to him by the then Prime Minister of Punjab, Khizar Hayat Tiwana, from the Punjab Peasant Welfare Fund. After finishing his PhD and doing post-doctoral research for a year in Cambridge, there was no immediate teaching position for Bambah at Delhi University or at the Department of Mathematics of Panjab University (PU) in 1951. Bambah went on to become one of India’s leading mathematicians. He served as the Vice Chancellor of PU from 1984 to 1991 and was honoured with the Padma Bhushan.

Nityanand had a less difficult time on his return as he got inducted into the newly established Central Drug Research Institute (CDRI), Lucknow, in 1952. He progressed to emerge as the leading medicinal chemistry scientist of India, became the Director, CDRI, and was honoured with the Padma Shri.

Among Khorana’s other Lahore classmates, Gurbaksh Singh co-authored three research papers with him on the synthesis of organic compounds, along with their teacher Mahan Singh. He progressed to become professor of chemistry at Benares Hindu University. He was appointed the first Vice-Chancellor (1974-79) of the Central University of Hyderabad, and then of DU (1980-85).

I had the fortune of getting together in Chandigarh Khorana’s four Lahore contemporaries — Bambah, Nityanand, Sukh Dev and Faqir Chand Kohli — at the PU convocation in March 2014.

Sukh Dev had done BSc in chemistry along with Khorana, Gurbaksh and Nityanand in 1943. Sukh Dev did PhD (1950) at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), went to the US to work as a post-doc (1950-51) at MIT, and returned to the IISc as a Senior Research Fellow. He became a lecturer after two years, and progressed to become a leading light in organic and natural product chemistry. He was an early awardee of the SS Bhatnagar Prize in chemistry (1964), and nurtured Goverdhan Mehta and other students. He received the Padma Bhushan in 2008.

Kohli (1924-2020) was Bambah’s classmate in BA. He had to abandon his master’s studies in Lahore when his father expired. However, he went abroad for studies later. He returned from the MIT and joined the Tata Electric Company in 1951. A visionary, he emerged as the ‘father of the software industry’ in India as he founded the Tata Consultancy Services.

The three other contemporaries of Khorana who travelled together in 1946 to the US on government fellowships were Satish Dhawan, Brahm Prakash and Indra Kapila.

Dhawan had returned to India in 1951 to serve first as a Senior Scientific Officer in the IISc. Prakash had obtained his first PhD in Lahore (1942) and the second from MIT in 1948. He was inducted by Homi Bhabha into the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Bombay, in 1949. Kapila returned to Punjab and contributed to the design and construction of the Bhakra Dam.

Khorana was awarded the Padma Vibhushan in 1969, soon after he got the Nobel Prize in 1968. After his demise in November 2011, the Punjab Government commenced the Khorana scholarship, which offers support to students scoring above 80 per cent marks in the school board examination. The Punjab State Council of Science and Technology (PSCST), in partnership with the Institute of Nano Science and Technology (INST), Mohali, proposed the initiation of the annual Har Gobind Khorana series of public lectures on bio-sciences

Venki Ramakrishnan was awarded the Nobel for his studies on ribosomes, which can be viewed as an extension of Khorana’s work. He was, therefore, chosen to deliver the first INST-PSCST Har Gobind Khorana Public Lecture on January 5, 2016, at PU.

Prof Uttam RajBhandary, a close colleague of Khorana for over five decades at Wisconsin and MIT, was invited to deliver the third lecture in 2017. School students were especially brought for the lecture which was full of personal reminiscences and anecdotes. In 2019, Prof Azim Ansari, Director, Khorana Programme at Wisconsin, visited Chandigarh to popularise the programme with the aim of nurturing ‘future Khoranas’.

In recent years, the Government of India has resumed a scheme to enable bright students to study abroad. Let’s hope that some of them would progress to win Nobel prizes and be counted among the leaders of development of 21st-century India by 2047.