James Watson

James Watson (1928- ), American molecular biologist, who with Francis Crick elucidated the structure of the nucleic acid, deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). He shared the 1962 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with Crick and Maurice Wilkins. Watson was instrumental in establishing the Human Genome Project in the United States.

James Dewey Watson was born in Chicago, and starred on the Quiz Kids radio programme before going to the University of Chicago aged 15. He shared a love of birds with his father and studied natural sciences and zoology at Chicago (1943-1947), including ornithological fieldwork. He went to Indiana University in 1947 (the California Institute of Technology and Harvard University had both turned him down) hoping to pursue ornithology, but as an undergraduate he had read What is life?, the influential book on genes and heredity by Erwin Schrödinger, and grew increasingly interested in genetics. Indiana offered courses in both genetics, from Hermann Muller, and viruses, from Salvador Luria, one of the founders of the Phage Group.

Watson worked on X-ray-irradiated bacteriophages for his doctorate thesis (1950), and then on Luria’s advice travelled to Europe. He wanted to work on the material of heredity, DNA, at the chemical level. He went first to Copenhagen to work with Herman Kalckar but was not particularly happy. In September 1951 he transferred to the Cavendish Laboratory, at the University of Cambridge, one of the world’s leading centres of X-ray crystallography, where Max Perutz was working on protein structure. Earlier that year, Watson had met Maurice Wilkins of King’s College, London. Wilkins had shown Watson his X-ray diffraction pictures of DNA. Watson believed that it would be possible to determine the structure of DNA from the analysis of X-ray diffraction patterns, and that knowing the structure of DNA would prove to be the key to understanding genes.

From 1951 to 1953 Watson and the British biophysicist Francis Crick worked together to determine the double helix structure of DNA. Crick was a research fellow who was still working for his doctorate on protein structure and 12 years Watson’s senior. Each man continued independent research; Watson worked on the structure of the tobacco mosaic virus, but chipped away at the DNA problem. They combined analysis of the improved X-ray diffraction pictures of DNA of Rosalind Franklin with Erwin Chargaff’s biochemical analysis of the symmetry among the four nucleotides or “bases” of DNA. Watson and Crick used models to help them work and the famous photograph of the two men and their double helix model has become an icon of molecular biology. They broke the news to the scientific world in the leading science journal Nature on April 25, 1953, an issue that also carried supporting papers by Wilkins and Franklin. Arthur Kornberg provided experimental proof for their model in 1956.

In the summer of 1953 Watson returned to America, spending the summer at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory of Quantitative Biology, New York, with Max Delbrück before becoming a research fellow at the California Institute of Technology. Here he worked with Alex Rich, hoping to do for ribonucleic acid (RNA) what he had achieved with DNA, but did not succeed, as the X-ray pictures were too indistinct. He spent another year (1955) with Crick at the Cavendish Laboratory before moving to the biology department at Harvard University in 1956. Here he had better success with RNA. He was extremely active in reorienting the teaching in his department to include molecular biology and as a result wrote his influential textbook, The Molecular Biology of the Gene (1965). Watson gave his own account of the DNA story in The Double Helix (1968). Just as his textbook had set new standards in its field, so his quirky human account of scientific research and bald discussion of his colleagues both shocked and delighted. A new departure in scientific autobiography and an international bestseller, it is still in print.

In 1968 Watson became director of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, while still at Harvard University. In 1972 he left Harvard to become full-time director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, expanding the remit of the laboratory and serving as its president until 2003. From 1988 to 1992 Watson ran the Human Genome Project at the National Institutes of Health, Maryland. He was involved in convincing the US government to provide funding, and demonstrated his continuing concerns with the ethics of science and lay misunderstanding of scientific issues, when he established the Ethical, Legal, and Social Issues Program as part of the work of the genome project in America.

In addition to sharing the 1962 Nobel Prize, Watson has received many honorary degrees and an honorary knighthood in the 2002 New Year's Honours List.