by Professor Ceiling Cat and Matthew Cobb (Matthew did the bits below the picture).
I missed today’s Google Doodle, which celebrates what would have been the 96th birthday of Har Ghobind Khorana (1922-2011), a molecular geneticist, biochemist, and Nobel Laureate. He was born in the Punjab, India, on what is supposed to be this day in 1922 (all we have is some sketchy documentation). His background was humble: he was the son of a tax clerk, but one devoted to educating his kids. After getting a degree at Lahore University, Khorana moved to England, where he got a Ph.D. at Liverpool University in 1948. After a postdoc in Zurich, he moved back to independent India, then to UBC in Vancouver, and then to the University of Wisconsin, where he became an American citizen. He wound up at MIT in 1970, having had a peripatetic life.
The doodle (which. intriguingly is visible primarily, in North America, India, Australia, Japan, Austria Sweden and Iceland – how do they decide these things?) shows Khorana carrying out the research that led to him winning the Nobel Prize in 1968—along with Marshall Nirenberg (who made the decisive breakthrough in 1961, with Heinrich Matthei) and Robert Holley—for his work on cracking the genetic code: how the information in DNA is turned into a protein.
Khorana was able to use his superior biochemical skills to synthesise small bits of RNA that were essential for working out what each ‘codon’ (3 letters of DNA or RNA) stood for in the genetic code. It was that insight and drive, expressed in particular in the years 1963-1966, that won him the Nobel. [JAC: How biologists cracked the coding is the topic of Matthew’s fine book, Life’s Greatest Secret: The Race to Crack the Genetic Code. I recommend it highly if you want a good biological detective story.]
The drawing of him in the center doesn’t show him playing some kind of odd musical instrument – he is ‘mouth pipetting’, so sucking up small quantities of often radioactive or otherwise noxious liquids to distribute them into various test tubes. This kind of procedure would be completely forbidden in any laboratory today.
Good catch on the unrealistic pairing of two RNA strands.
Well, maybe it’s a bit of a tRNA hairpin?
nah. Just license as PCCe says on a neato drawing is all.
Thanks for noting this. BTW, I’m olde enough to remember mouth pipetting.
Me too – how times have changed, mouth pipetting P32 tagged reagents was pretty common practice. This may explain a lot! The days of metal plates on the floor where a grad student had dropped a bottle of label and then walked it along the corridor on his shoes are, thankfully, behind us. Radioactivity in biology seems to have largely gone the same way as mouth pipetting.
And that in turn was an improvement over (I believe it was) Berzelius, who trained his students in *taste identification* of stuff.
This Google Doodle was in New Zealand yesterday (Tuesday) too.
Very good. I remember well the practice of mouth pipetting. Nothing so dangerous as radioisotopes, but definitely not stuff that I wanted to taste.
I was on the PhD committee of a student who went on to postdoc with Khorana. Numerous people cautioned him, saying things like, “You know, he’s 70y/o.” His ready reply was, “My PhD advisor (who was Klaus Hofmann, then one of the grand old men of peptide chemistry) is over 80.”
When P32 was involved, we invariably employed those slightly clumsy propipettes. But, of course, we used mouth pipetting for everything else, including bacterial cultures, and more than once I swallowed some of this material. Since it was always one lab strain or another of E. coli, I judged that I was just sending them home, to join their distant cousins.
They had to show just 2 complementary RNA triplets, the synthesized one (artificial codon) and the anticodon. But I guess longer strands were considered better-looking.
I know someone who once mouth-pipetted a suspension of live Trichinella larvae and swallowed a bit.