James Watson

James Dewey Watson (April 6, 1928 – November 6, 2025) was an American molecular biologist, geneticist, and zoologist. In 1953, he and Francis Crick co-authored an academic paper in Nature proposing the double helix structure of the DNA molecule. In 1962, Watson, Crick, and Maurice Wilkins were awarded the 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".

Watson earned degrees at the University of Chicago (Bachelor of Science, 1947) and Indiana University Bloomington (PhD, 1950). After 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 met his future collaborator Francis Crick. From 1956 to 1976, Watson was employed by the faculty of the Harvard University Biology Department, promoting research in molecular biology.

From 1968, Watson served as the director of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) in Laurel Hollow, New York, 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, Watson started as president and served for 10 years. He was then appointed chancellor, serving until his resignation in 2007 after making comments claiming that there is a genetic link between race and intelligence. In 2019, after the broadcast of a documentary where Watson reiterated these views on race and genetics, CSHL revoked his honorary titles and severed all ties with him.

Watson wrote 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.

James Dewey Watson was born in Chicago on April 6, 1928, the only son of Jean (née Mitchell) and James D. Watson, a businessman descended mostly from colonial English immigrants to America. His maternal grandfather, Lauchlin Mitchell, a tailor, was from Glasgow, Scotland, and his maternal grandmother, Lizzie Gleason, was the child of parents from County Tipperary, Ireland. Watson's mother was a modestly religious Catholic and his father an Episcopalian who had lost his belief in God. Watson grew up Catholic, but he later described himself as "an escapee from the Catholic religion". Watson said, "The luckiest thing that ever happened to me was that my father didn't believe in God." By age 11, Watson stopped attending mass and embraced the "pursuit of scientific and humanistic knowledge."

Watson grew up on the South Side of Chicago and attended public schools, including Horace Mann Elementary School and South Shore High School. He was fascinated with bird watching, a hobby shared with his father, so Watson considered majoring in ornithology. He appeared on Quiz Kids, a popular radio show that challenged bright youngsters to answer questions. Thanks to the liberal policy of university president Robert Hutchins, Watson enrolled at the University of Chicago, where he was awarded a tuition scholarship at age 15. Among his professors was Louis Leon Thurstone, from whom Watson learned about factor analysis, which he later referenced on his controversial views on race.

After reading Erwin Schrödinger's book What Is Life? in 1946, Watson changed his professional ambitions from the study of ornithology to genetics. Watson earned his Bachelor of Science degree in zoology from the University of Chicago the following year. 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. Watson received his Doctor of Philosophy degree from Indiana University Bloomington in 1950; Salvador Luria was his doctoral advisor.

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. 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.