This article provides a brief summary of Har Gobind Khorana’s early years in science including his years as an independent investigator at the British Columbia Research Council in Vancouver, Canada. It also includes interesting anecdotes about his career and about him as a scientist based on his own writings, including (1) how he simply showed up in the laboratory of Dr. Vladimir Prelog in Zurich, with no recommendations, and pleaded for a little space to do postdoctoral research under him, (2) how his determination and tenacity to learn the German language well introduced him to the world of a class of chemical reagents called ‘carbodiimides’, which proved pivotal for much of his early work on the synthesis of nucleotides, nucleotide coenzymes and the first synthesis of a gene, and (3) how he ended up in Vancouver, Canada for his first position as an independent investigator.