The Google doodle has honoured noted biochemist Har Gobind Khorana with a doodle on his 96th birth anniversary. The Indian American is most famous for winning the Nobel Prize in 1968 in the field of medicine. He was awarded for his research on how the genetic code of a cell controls the cell’s synthesis of proteins. Born on January 9, 1922, in a village called Raipur in Punjab, which is now in Pakistan, Har Gobind Khorana lived in India till 1945 when he was awarded a fellowship by Government of India. This helped him to travel to the United Kingdom and pursue Ph.D, at the University of Liverpool where his research was supervised by Roger JS Beer .
After this, he spent time at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule in Zurich with Professor Vladimir Prelog. Foe some time he returned back India, before going back to England where his interest in proteins and nucleic acids came to fruition in Cambridge. He did research at universities in England, Switzerland, and Canada. Khorana was awarded a Nobel Prize along with two other fellow researchers at the University of Wisconsin. The trio discovered that the order of nucleotides in our DNA suggests which amino acids are built. He passed away on November 9, 2011, in the US.
Earlier on Sunday, the Google Doodle paid homage to Fearless Wadia on her 110th birthday. Her name was Mary Ann Evans and was born on January 9, 1908, in Perth, Australia. She emerged as the original Bollywood stuntwoman in the 1930s and 1940s. “Gutsy stunt star Fearless Nadia is ready to rumble in today’s Doodle, which was created by Bangalore-based comic illustrator Devaki Neogi. The illustration draws inspiration from the action movie posters of old-time Hindi cinema. Happy Birthday, Fearless Nadia!” the search engine giant has said.
She was discovered by Jamshed Boman Homi Wadia who gave her the first break in a lead role in 1935 film Hunterwali. With this film, she stormed into the silver screen and established herself as the stunt queen of the new era. she worked in six of Wadia’s films – Hunterwali, Pahadi Kanya, Miss Fronter Mail, Lutaru Lalna, Punjab Mail and Diamond Queen. Movie fans used to throng to theatres to watch her stunts. Nadia decided to call it quits in the early 60s. She, however, returned to screen with Riyad Wadia’s 1993 documentary ‘Fearless: The Hunterwali’.
