The Shy Nobel Laureate: Har Gobind Khorana and ‘Total Synthesis’ | The Rearview Podcast

What happens when a bureaucratic blunder wrecks a young scientist’s career plans, and the wreckage turns out to be the making of him? And why would a man who helped crack the language of life spend decades insisting that his greatest triumph was only a detour?In this episode of The Rearview, we trace the life of Har Gobind Khorana, only one of four Indian origin scientists who were awarded a Nobel Prize. He was born in pre-Partition Punjab, the son of a village tax clerk. A scholarship took him from Lahore to Liverpool, Zürich and Cambridge. Friendships, family and a wife who kept his world running took him on to Vancouver, Madison and MIT.What it means to build molecules from scratch, why that mattered to biology and what did Khorana achieve that others in a celebrated scientific race did not? We also ask how he related to the country he left, whether “brain drain” fits his case.Hosts: Jacob Koshy & Sobhana K NairProducer and editor: Jude WestonFor more episodes of The Rearview: Published - October 12, 2026 06:57 pm IST