Google continues to inspire as well as inform with their Google Doodles. Today’s (Jan. 9) homepage artwork has been transformed to celebrate the achievements of the late Dr. Har Gobind Khorana, an Indian-American biochemist who played a pivotal role in discovering the inner workings of DNA.
Khorana was born on this day in 1922, in Raipur in Punjab, which is now part of present-day Pakistan. He left India in 1945, traveling to the U.K. to earn a Ph.D at the University of Liverpool. Khorana spent time studying in various countries, including Switzerland and Canada. According to the Google Doodle, he earned his Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1968, along with two researchers. The three scientists cracked the code that is DNA as they learned about the inner functions of the nucleotides — discovering that the order of nucleotides determines which amino acids are built.
The artwork, created by Bangalore-based artist Rohan Dahotre, depicts Dr. Khorana (who passed away in 2011) in a black and white sketch alongside another cartoon of him in a laboratory. The model of DNA streams the top of the artwork, with the inner neucleotides colored in the signature Google blue, red, yellow, and green.
Check out the Doodle and read more about Dr. Har Gobind Khorana here, as well as early sketches of the Doodle below.
