Settled in Madison, Khorana began to expand his laboratory and start new projects. Two of the young scientists who joined the laboratory in 1962 were Uttam RajBhandary and Dieter Söll. RajBhandary, who became a lifelong friend and eventually also moved to MIT in concert with Khorana, came from Nepal where he was born in the Kathmandu valley. He received a B.Sc. in 1952 from the University of Patna in India and an M.Sc. from Presidency College, Calcutta (now Kolkata), also in India. Subsequently, he earned his Ph.D. from the University of Durham (in a unit that is now part of Newcastle University) under the supervision of Professor (later Sir) James Baddiley, who had been a graduate student with Todd at Cambridge and had been the first person to synthesize ATP artificially (though the reaction was more complex than the one-step procedure that Khorana later devised in Vancouver).

RajBhandary's thesis project had been the synthesis of Coenzyme A but, in 1961, Moffatt and Khorana had beaten him to that goal. Disappointed, RajBhandary went back to Nepal for six weeks to take stock of the situation. Returning to Durham, he completed a thesis in 1962 on the chemistry of molecules that form part of bacterial cell membranes. Khorana had known Baddiley from his time at Cambridge and had asked for his help in expanding his laboratory. Baddiley had recommended RajBhandary and the latter joined Khorana's laboratory as Senior Project Associate.

Khorana had handed RajBhandary his laboratory notebooks with the records of exploratory experiments on what was then called soluble RNA but was about to be recognized as transfer RNA (tRNA) which played a cen-tral role in the synthesis of proteins in the cell. These became the focus of RajBhandary's research during a long and productive career, even though Robert Holley at Cornell University beat him to the goal of first sequencing a tRNA molecule in 1965. (Sequencing the tRNA molecule earned Holley a share of the 1968 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine along with Khorana and Marshall Nirenberg, whose work will be discussed at some length below.)