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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 June 2025
On the evening of December 10, 1968, on the seventy-second anniversary of Alfred Nobel's death, a slightly built Indian American man, only 44 years old, stood before King Gustaf Adolf of Sweden on a stage in the Konserthuset Stockholm (the Stockholm Concert Hall). By the king's side were Princess Christina and Prince Bertil of Sweden. The slightly built man was Har Gobind Khorana, and he was there to receive his share of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Accompanying him was his Swiss-born wife, Esther Elizabeth.
The Prize ceremony was followed by a formal banquet with about 1,300 guests. The menu included lobster and avocados as a starter, lamb with creamed mushrooms as the main course, and pineapple ice cream and cake for dessert. To drink, they had a choice of Pommery & Greno Brut or Château d’Yquem 1962. Afterward the Khoranas sipped Courvoisier. It was a joyous occasion.
In 1968, as today, the Nobel Prize was the greatest honor that a scientist can receive. Khorana received his prize for his role in solving the most important problem of molecular biology of his era: the nature of the genetic code. By the mid-1950s it had become clear that a string of four DNA nucleotides (adenosine [A], cytosine [C], guanine [G], and thymine [T]) in genes determined, by the order of their occurrence, the string of amino acid residues in protein molecules that carried out most of life's activities. These amino acid residues were of 20 types. But which sequence of DNA nucleotides specified which amino acid residues? This translation was carried out according to the genetic code. It turned out, as Khorana definitively established, that a triplet “codon” of nucleotides specified each amino acid residue. He established exactly which triplet of nucleotides specified each amino acid residue.
The problem of the genetic code had moved to the center of attention in molecular biology in the late 1950s, shortly after Francis Crick and James D. Watson established that DNA had the structure of a double helix with nucleotides strung along the two backbones that faced each other along the central core of the double helix.
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