James Watson(1928–)

James Dewey Watson was born at Chicago, Illinois, on the sixth of April 1928, only son of James D. Watson Senior, a Chicago debt-collector, and Jean Mitchell, of partly-Scottish descent. He was raised on the South Side of Chicago, was a quiz-kid prodigy on the WLS Radio Quiz Kids programme at eleven, was admitted to the University of Chicago's experimental early-entrance programme at fifteen, took the BS in zoology at Chicago in 1947 at nineteen on the Chicago system of accelerated three-year undergraduate degrees, and took the PhD in zoology at Indiana University at Bloomington in 1950 at twenty-two under the mentorship of Salvador Luria, the foundational figure of American molecular-biology (and Nobel laureate 1969).

He took the postdoctoral year 1950 to 1951 at the Statens Serum Institut at Copenhagen with the Danish bacteriophage geneticist Herman Kalckar, transferred in October 1951 to the Medical Research Council Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge on the strength of a Polio Foundation Fellowship, and met on his first day there the Cavendish physicist Francis Crick, with whom he was assigned to share an office. The two of them resolved together in their first months at the Cavendish that the central single unsolved problem of molecular biology was the three-dimensional structure of the deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) molecule, the substance that Avery, MacLeod and McCarty had identified in 1944 as the carrier of hereditary information.

They worked through 1951 and 1952 on the structure-determination problem, drawing on the X-ray crystallographic photographs of DNA fibres taken by Rosalind Franklin at King's College London (the famous Photograph 51, taken by Franklin and Raymond Gosling in May 1952, was shown to Watson by Maurice Wilkins in January 1953 without Franklin's knowledge or permission, the data which gave Watson and Crick the critical insight on the helical geometry). Through February 1953 the two of them built at the Cavendish the metal-and-cardboard model of the proposed double-helix structure: two anti-parallel polynucleotide chains wound around a common axis with the deoxyribose-and-phosphate backbones on the outside and the four nucleotide bases (adenine, thymine, cytosine, guanine) paired by hydrogen-bonding in the middle in the specific patterns adenine-thymine and cytosine-guanine.

The discovery was published in the single-page paper Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid in the journal Nature on the twenty-fifth of April 1953, accompanied by separate papers from the King's College team under Wilkins and Franklin. The closing sentence of the Watson-Crick paper (It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material) is on every modern list of the great understatements of twentieth-century scientific publication; it set out the central single mechanism of inheritance that founded the next seventy years of molecular biology, genetics, biotechnology and biomedicine.

He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962 jointly with Crick and Wilkins (Franklin had died of ovarian cancer in 1958 and the Nobel rules do not permit posthumous awards). He took the chairmanship of Harvard's Biological Laboratories from 1961 to 1976, served as Director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island from 1968 to 1994 (and as President 1994 to 2003), founded the Human Genome Project in 1988 and served as its founding Director at the National Institutes of Health from 1988 to 1992, and wrote the foundational molecular-biology textbook Molecular Biology of the Gene (1965, eighth edition 2024) which has remained the standard graduate-level textbook in the field for sixty years. The Watson name in modern molecular biology carries the weight of the twenty-fifth of April 1953 paper.