James Watson
James Dewey Watson (born April 6, 1928) is an American molecular biologist, geneticist, and zoologist. In 1953, he co-authored with Francis Crick the academic paper proposing the double helix structure of the DNA molecule. Watson, Crick and Maurice Wilkins were awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material".
For other people named James Watson, see James Watson (disambiguation).
James Watson
2
- Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research (1960)
- Member of the National Academy of Sciences (1962)
- Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (1962)
- John J. Carty Award (1971)
- Foreign Member of the Royal Society (1981)[1]
- EMBO Membership (1985)[2]
- Copley Medal (1993)[1][3]
- Lomonosov Gold Medal (1994)
- Ewan Birney[6]
- Ronald W. Davis (postdoc)
- Phillip Allen Sharp (postdoc)
- Richard J. Roberts (postdoc)[7]
- John Tooze (postdoc)[8][9]
Watson earned degrees at the University of Chicago (BS, 1947) and Indiana University (PhD, 1950). Following a post-doctoral year at the University of Copenhagen with Herman Kalckar and Ole Maaløe, Watson worked at the University of Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory in England, where he first met his future collaborator Francis Crick. From 1956 to 1976, Watson was on the faculty of the Harvard University Biology Department, promoting research in molecular biology.
From 1968, Watson served as director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL), greatly expanding its level of funding and research. At CSHL, he shifted his research emphasis to the study of cancer, along with making it a world-leading research center in molecular biology. In 1994, he started as president and served for 10 years. He was then appointed chancellor, serving until he resigned in 2007 after making comments claiming that there is a genetic link between intelligence and race. In 2019, following the broadcast of a documentary in which Watson reiterated these views on race and genetics, CSHL revoked his honorary titles and severed all ties with him.
Watson has written many science books, including the textbook Molecular Biology of the Gene (1965) and his bestselling book The Double Helix (1968). Between 1988 and 1992, Watson was associated with the National Institutes of Health, helping to establish the Human Genome Project, which completed the task of mapping the human genome in 2003.
Early life and education[edit]
Watson was born in Chicago on April 6, 1928, as the only son of Jean (née Mitchell) and James D. Watson, a businessman descended mostly from colonial English immigrants to America.[11] His mother's father, Lauchlin Mitchell, a tailor, was from Glasgow, Scotland, and her mother, Lizzie Gleason, was the child of parents from County Tipperary, Ireland.[12] Raised Catholic, he later described himself as "an escapee from the Catholic religion".[13] Watson said, "The luckiest thing that ever happened to me was that my father didn't believe in God."[14]
Watson grew up on the South Side of Chicago and attended public schools, including Horace Mann Elementary School and South Shore High School.[11][15] He was fascinated with bird watching, a hobby shared with his father,[16] so he considered majoring in ornithology.[17] Watson appeared on Quiz Kids, a popular radio show that challenged bright youngsters to answer questions.[18] Thanks to the liberal policy of university president Robert Hutchins, he enrolled at the University of Chicago, where he was awarded a tuition scholarship, at the age of 15.[11][17][19] Among his professors was Louis Leon Thurstone from whom Watson learned about factor analysis, which he would later reference on his controversial views on race.[20]
After reading Erwin Schrödinger's book, What Is Life? in 1946, Watson changed his professional ambitions from the study of ornithology to genetics.[21] Watson earned his BS degree in zoology from the University of Chicago in 1947.[17] In his autobiography, Avoid Boring People, Watson described the University of Chicago as an "idyllic academic institution where he was instilled with the capacity for critical thought and an ethical compulsion not to suffer fools who impeded his search for truth", in contrast to his description of later experiences. In 1947 Watson left the University of Chicago to become a graduate student at Indiana University, attracted by the presence at Bloomington of the 1946 Nobel Prize winner Hermann Joseph Muller, who in crucial papers published in 1922, 1929, and in the 1930s had laid out all the basic properties of the heredity molecule that Schrödinger presented in his 1944 book.[22] He received his PhD degree from Indiana University in 1950; Salvador Luria was his doctoral advisor.[17][23]
Career and research[edit]
Luria, Delbrück, and the Phage Group[edit]
Originally, Watson was drawn into molecular biology by the work of Salvador Luria. Luria eventually shared the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on the Luria–Delbrück experiment, which concerned the nature of genetic mutations. He was part of a distributed group of researchers who were making use of the viruses that infect bacteria, called bacteriophages. He and Max Delbrück were among the leaders of this new "Phage Group", an important movement of geneticists from experimental systems such as Drosophila towards microbial genetics. Early in 1948, Watson began his PhD research in Luria's laboratory at Indiana University.[23] That spring, he met Delbrück first in Luria's apartment and again that summer during Watson's first trip to the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL).[24][25]
The Phage Group was the intellectual medium where Watson became a working scientist. Importantly, the members of the Phage Group sensed that they were on the path to discovering the physical nature of the gene. In 1949, Watson took a course with Felix Haurowitz that included the conventional view of that time: that genes were proteins and able to replicate themselves.[26] The other major molecular component of chromosomes, DNA, was widely considered to be a "stupid tetranucleotide", serving only a structural role to support the proteins.[27] Even at this early time, Watson, under the influence of the Phage Group, was aware of the Avery–MacLeod–McCarty experiment, which suggested that DNA was the genetic molecule. Watson's research project involved using X-rays to inactivate bacterial viruses.[28]
Watson then went to Copenhagen University in September 1950 for a year of postdoctoral research, first heading to the laboratory of biochemist Herman Kalckar.[11] Kalckar was interested in the enzymatic synthesis of nucleic acids, and he wanted to use phages as an experimental system. Watson wanted to explore the structure of DNA, and his interests did not coincide with Kalckar's.[29] After working part of the year with Kalckar, Watson spent the remainder of his time in Copenhagen conducting experiments with microbial physiologist Ole Maaløe, then a member of the Phage Group.[30]
The experiments, which Watson had learned of during the previous summer's Cold Spring Harbor phage conference, included the use of radioactive phosphate as a tracer to determine which molecular components of phage particles actually infect the target bacteria during viral infection.[29] The intention was to determine whether protein or DNA was the genetic material, but upon consultation with Max Delbrück,[29] they determined that their results were inconclusive and could not specifically identify the newly labeled molecules as DNA.[31] Watson never developed a constructive interaction with Kalckar, but he did accompany Kalckar to a meeting in Italy, where Watson saw Maurice Wilkins talk about X-ray diffraction data for DNA.[11] Watson was now certain that DNA had a definite molecular structure that could be elucidated.[32]
In 1951, the chemist Linus Pauling in California published his model of the amino acid alpha helix, a result that grew out of Pauling's efforts in X-ray crystallography and molecular model building. After obtaining some results from his phage and other experimental research[33] conducted at Indiana University, Statens Serum Institut (Denmark), CSHL, and the California Institute of Technology, Watson now had the desire to learn to perform X-ray diffraction experiments so he could work to determine the structure of DNA. That summer, Luria met John Kendrew,[34] and he arranged for a new postdoctoral research project for Watson in England.[11] In 1951 Watson visited the Stazione Zoologica 'Anton Dohrn' in Naples.[35]