Have you peeped Google today? It's all about Har Gobind Khorana, a famed biochemist who conducted extensive research on human genetics.
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The search engine, which sometimes uses its homepage to honor prominent figures, is highlighting the scholar to celebrate what would have been his 96th birthday.
Born in 1922 in Raipur, India, Khorana gravitated toward the sciences at a young age thanks to his father, who encouraged him and his four siblings to learn to read and write.
He later received scholarships to pursue higher education, earning his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in chemistry from Punjab University and his doctorate in organic chemistry from the University of Liverpool in England.
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His biggest breakthrough came in the 1960s during his time at the University of Wisconsin when he and two of his colleagues discovered that "the order of nucleotides in our DNA determines which amino acids are built," Google wrote in its blog.
Khorana went on to construct the first synthetic gene less than five years later, and his work was recognized by several research institutions.
He received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1968 and was elected the Foreign Member of the Royal Society in 1978. And in 2007, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the Indo-U.S. Science and Technology Forum and the government of India created the Khoran Program to help foster a community of scientists, industrialists and entrepreneurs.
Now Google is paying tribute to Khorana, who died Nov. 11, 2011. Check out the doodle archive to view Khorana's doodle.
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