After the partition of August 1947, both India and Pakistan attempted to reconstruct their pasts by adopting Hegel’s philosophical approach to recording and presenting history to reinforce respective national narratives and ideologies. Its essence - selectively objectifying records and presenting the facts to proceed in a particular direction – was selecting the periods, regions, events and characters of their choice while discarding those challenging their agenda of nation-building and state-building. Consequently, many talented, competent, capable, benign and humane souls, who had served the people in various capacities, forms and situations were excluded from the pages of official histories and academic writings.

Like many others, Har Gobind Khurana, a Nobel laureate, has fallen prey to this project of disowning heroes, philanthropists and scientists on account of their faith. His 100th birth anniversary (January 9, 1922) passed without any commemoration by Punjabis in particular and Pakistanis in general.

Khurana was born in a small village, Raipur, in Multan district. It is now a part of Kabirwala tehsil of Khanewal district in the Punjab. His father was a patwari (a village clerk in the agricultural revenue collection system). Despite being poor, his father was dedicated to educating his children. They were practically the only educated family in the village inhabited by about 100 people.

Little is known about his childhood and early life. As there was no formal school in the village at that time, he mostly learnt from his father and his elder siblings at an informal school in the village. After four years of informal education, he attended Dayanand Anglo-Vedic High School in Multan. Then, at the age of eighteen, he got admission in Punjab University, Lahore, where he completed his bachelor of science in 1943 and master of science in 1945.

In 1945, the Government of India awarded him a scholarship to study organic chemistry at the University of Liverpool in the United Kingdom. He completed his PhD under the supervision of Roger JS Beer in 1948, a year after the bloody and tragic partition of the Punjab. His family had to leave Multan for Delhi and he decided to stay in England instead of returning home. The next year he pursued postdoctoral studies with Professor Vladimir Prelog at ETH Zurich in Switzerland, where for nearly a year he worked on alkaloid chemistry. It was an unpaid position.

He returned to India and stayed with his family for a brief period in 1949. However, he could not find a job there. So, he decided to return to England, where he worked with George Wallace Kenner and Alexander R Todd on peptides and nucleotides. He stayed in Cambridge from 1950 to 1952.

There are hardly a few Punjabis in particular and Pakistanis in general who know the “father of chemical biology”, whose legacy has transformed our understanding of genes, genetics and the genome and impacted the clinical course of many illnesses, from cancer to Covid-19.

In 1952, the British Columbia Research Council at the University of British Columbia, Canada, offered him a position that he accepted and moved there with his family. He worked on “nucleic acids and synthesis of many important biomolecules”. Soon, due to his innovative scientific methods, he was widely recognised by other scientists.

In 1960, he moved to the University of Wisconsin at Madison, accepting the post of co-director of the Institute for Enzyme Research, where he was promoted to the post of professor of biochemistry in 1962. There, he and his colleagues began to work on understanding the exact mechanisms of translating genes into proteins—the code of life or the genetic code (how the “language” of DNA and RNA is transformed into proteins in the cell). Khurana was able to show that triplet sequences encode specific amino acids, corroborating the work of Marshall Nirenberg, who was to share the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1968 with him.

Har Gobind Khurana’s role, according to the Nobel Prize website, is as follows: “[He] made important contributions to this field by building different RNA chains with the help of enzymes. Using these enzymes, he was able to produce proteins. The amino acid sequences of these proteins then solved the rest of the puzzle.”

A few years after receiving the Nobel Prize, Khurana transitioned his research work to biological membranes and light transduction in the photoreceptor cells of the retina. In 1971 he was appointed as the Alfred P Sloan professor of biology and chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1971. He retired from MIT in 2007 and breathed his last on November 9, 2011. Upon his death in 2011, obituaries across the scientific journals spoke of a scientist “who traversed boundaries,” pioneering “concepts and tools from chemistry and physics to tackle fundamental questions of biology”.

In addition to the Nobel Prize, Khurana received the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award (1968) and the National Medal of Science (1987).

However, there are hardly a few Punjabis in particular and Pakistanis in general who know the “father of chemical biology” whose legacy has transformed our understanding of genes, genetics, and the genome and impacted the clinical course of many illnesses from cancer to Covid-19. This is probably because he has never been given the place in the local discourse and the textbooks he deserved, mainly due to his faith. Thus, he has been otherised in our literature through the communalisation of textbooks and academic writings.

He was born in a Punjabi family in what is now Pakistan. Instead of disowning him, we should accept and treat him as a local hero. There is a dire need to include chapters on Har Gobind Khurana and his contributions to science – chemistry, biology and genetics – in our textbooks.

The writer has a PhD in history from Shanghai University and is a lecturer at GCU, Faisalabad. He can be contacted at mazharabbasgondal87@gmail.com. He tweets at @MazharGondal87