Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, 1968 — shared with Marshall Nirenberg and Robert Holley for breaking the genetic code, showing how the four-letter sequence in DNA translates into the amino acids that build every protein in every cell. The youngest of five children, born in 1922 in Raipur, a village of about 100 people in pre-Partition Punjab. His father was a patwari, the village clerk; the family was the only literate one for some distance. From there to Punjab University, then Liverpool, then Cambridge, then the British Columbia Research Council, then Wisconsin, then MIT, then the Nobel. Khorana's biological work continued through to the synthesis of the first artificial gene. The diaspora's most consequential laboratory career — and a near-perfect refutation of the idea that the village-school child cannot get to Stockholm.