Modern figure
Har Gobind Khorana
ਹਰਗੋਬਿੰਦ ਖੁਰਾਣਾہر گوبند کھُرانا
Biochemist from a village near Multan who shared the 1968 Nobel Prize for showing how the genetic code is read.
Har Gobind Khorana was born in 1922 in Raipur, a small village in the Multan district, where his father was a village tax clerk; he later said his was almost the only literate family in the village. He studied at the Punjab University in Lahore and went to Liverpool on a scholarship.
Working in Canada and the United States, he worked out how the sequence of letters in DNA spells out the amino acids of proteins, and shared the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1968. He went on to make the first artificial gene. He died in Massachusetts in 2011.