Har Gobind Khorana
- Born January 9, 1922 - Raipur, India
Indian-born American biochemist who shared the Nobel Prize in
Physiology or Medicine in 1968 with Marshal W. Nirenberg and
Robert W. Holley for research that helped to show how the genetic
components of the cell nucleus control the synthesis of proteins.
Khorana was born into a poor family and attended Punjab University
at Lahore and University of Liverpool, England, on government
scholarships. He obtained his Ph.D. at Liverpool in 1948. In 1971,
he joined the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology.
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
- Born October 19, 1910 - Lahore, India (now
part of Pakistan)
Indian-born American astrophysicist who, with William A. Fowler,
won the 1983 Nobel Prize for Physics by formulating the currently
accepted theory on the later evolutionary stages of massive stars.
Chandrasekhar joined the staff of the University of Chicago in
1938 and became a U.S. citizen in 1953. Besides doing work on
energy transfer by radiation in stellar atmospheres and convention
on the solar surface, he also attempted to develop the
mathematical theory of black holes.
Three Indian citizens have won the Nobel Prize:
Rabindranath Tagore (1913 - Literature) for his work titled
“Gitanjali”; Sir Chandrasekhara V. Raman (1930 -
Physics) for the discovery that when light traverses a transparent
material, some of the light changes in wavelength; and Mother
Teresa (1979 - Peace) for helping thousands in and around
Calcutta through her congregation, Missionaries of Charity. Born
to Albanian parents in Yugoslavia, she became an Indian Citizen in
1948.
