James D. Watson

James D. Watson By Surya Krishnan

James Dewey Watson was born on April 6, 1928 in Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A. His family has a Scottish-English background. He spent his time in education in nearby schools to his home, and went to the University of Chicago at the young age of 15, as he got a scholarship in his high school. In university, he studied Zoology, and got a B.Sc. degree in it. Later, he moved on into the Indiana University in Bloomington, where he got his Ph.D. in zoology. *His Ph.D. thesis was a study of the effect of hard X-rays on bacteriophage multiplication.*

James went to the University of Copenhagen in Denmark in 1950 to 1951, where he started his research on the structure of DNA. In 1951, James D. Watson met up with Maurice Wilkins, and saw the crystalline DNA’s X-ray diffraction pattern for the first time. That made him change the direction of his research to go in the direction of working with the structural chemistry of nucleic acids and proteins. He started his work with John Kendrew in 1951.

Soon, he met Francis Crick, who shared the same interest with Watson on finding the structure of DNA. They collaborated and started yet another project in Cambridge. Their first effort on finding the structure did not work, but after more research and work, their second attempt, conducted in the spring of 1953, worked. Their experiment concluded that DNA has a double-helix structure, which resembles a twisting ladder. It also showed that a DNA molecule can duplicate itself. The results of their experiment were published in a British journal called “Nature”.

Both James D. Watson and Francis Crick got the Nobel Prize in the field of Physiology for their discovery.
After his amazing discovery, James D. Watson moved on to be a professor of biology in Harvard University for 15 years. He also created one of the most used biology texts in universities, “Molecular Biology of the Gene”.
Watson also took hold of the Quantitative Biology laboratory at Cold Spring Harbor and transformed the lab into a molecular biology research facility.

In 1988, James D. Watson got invited from America’s National Institute of Health to be Associate Director of the Human Genome Project. The next year he became director. The Genome Project was a project to create a directory of the genetic code of humans. After giving the Genome project a good start, Watson left the Genome Project in 1992.
In 2007, his reputation was slightly destroyed because of the statements he made in the past times about the intelligence level of Africans, and he resigned as Chancellor of the Cold Spring Harbor laboratory.