Har Gobind Khorana was one of the first scientists to demonstrate the role of nucleotides in protein synthesis and helped crack the genetic code. He also helped develop custom-designed pieces of artificial genes and methods that anticipated the invention of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) process, a biochemical technology used to amplify a single or a few copies of a piece of DNA. Har Khorana was born on January 9, 1922  in Raipur, West Pakistan. His father was a clerk in the British Indian government. he studied at the Punjab University in Lahore where he obtained an M. Sc. degree. Mahan Singh, a great teacher and accurate experimentalist, was his supervisor.

He obtained his Ph.D. at Liverpool in 1948. He began research on nucleic acids during a fellowship at the University of Cambridge(1951) under Sir Alexander Todd. He held fellowships and professorships in Switzerland at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, in Canada at the University of British Columbia (1952–59), and in the United States at the University of Wisconsin (1960–70). In 1966 Khorana became a naturalized citizen of the United States, and in 1971 he joined the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he remained until he retired in 2007. In addition to the Nobel Prize, Khorana received the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award (1968) and the National Medal of Science (1987).