Biographical
Sketch
James Dewey Watson was born in Chicago,
Ill., on April 6th, 1928, as the only son
of James D. Watson, a businessman, and Jean
Mitchell. His father's ancestors were originally
of English descent and had lived in the midwest
for several generations. His mother's father
was a Scottish-born taylor married to a daughter
of Irish immigrants who arrived in the United
States about 1840. Young Watson's entire
boyhood was spent in Chicago where he attended
for eight years Horace Mann Grammar School
and for two years South Shore High School.
He then received a tuition scholarship to
the University of Chicago, and in the summer
of 1943 entered their experimental four-year
college.
In 1947, he received a B.Sc. degree in Zoology.
During these years his boyhood interest in
bird-watching had matured into a serious
desire to learn genetics. This became possible
when he received a Fellowship for graduate
study in Zoology at Indiana University in
Bloomington, where he received his Ph.D.
degree in Zoology in 1950. At Indiana, he
was deeply influenced both by the geneticists
H. J. Muller and T. M. Sonneborn, and by
S. E. Luria, the Italian-born microbiologist
then on the staff of Indiana's Bacteriology
Department. Watson's Ph.D. thesis, done under
Luria's able guidance, was a study of the
effect of hard X-rays on bacteriophage multiplication.
From September 1950 to
September 1951 he spent his first postdoctoral
year in Copenhagen
as a Merck Fellow of the National Research
Council. Part of the year was spent with
the biochemist Herman Kalckar, the remainder
with the microbiologist Ole Maaløe.
Again he worked with bacterial viruses, attempting
to study the fate of DNA of infecting virus
particles. During the spring of 1951, he
went with Kalckar to the Zoological Station
at Naples. There at a Symposium, late in
May, he met Maurice Wilkins and saw for the
first time the X-ray diffraction pattern
of crystalline DNA. This greatly stimulated
him to change the direction of his research
toward the structural chemistry of nucleic
acids end proteins. Fortunately this proved
possible when Luria, in early August 1951,
arranged with John Kendrew for him to work
at the Cavendish Laboratory, where he started
work in early October 1951.
He soon met Crick and discovered their common
interest in solving the DNA structure. They
thought it should be possible to correctly
guess its structure, given both the experimental
evidence at King's College plus careful examination
of the possible stereochemical configurations
of polynucleotide chains. Their first serious
effort, in the late fall of 1951, was unsatisfactory.
Their second effort based upon more experimental
evidence and better appreciation of the nucleic
acid literature, resulted, early in March
1953, in the proposal of the complementary
double-helical configuration.
At the same time, he was experimentally
investigating the structure of TMV, using
X-ray diffraction techniques. His object
was to see if its chemical sub-units, earlier
revealed by the elegant experiments of Schramm,
were helically arranged. This objective was
achieved in late June 1952, when use of the
Cavendish's newly constructed rotating anode
X-ray tubes allowed an unambiguous demonstration
of the helical construction of the virus.
From 1953 to 1955, Watson was at the California
Institute of Technology as Senior Research
Fellow in Biology. There he collaborated
with Alexander Rich in X-ray diffraction
studies of RNA. In 1955-1956 he was back
in the Cavendish, again working with Crick.
During this visit they published several
papers on the general principles of virus
construction.
Since the fall of 1956,
he has been a member of the Harvard Biology
Department, first
as Assistant Professor, then in 1958 as an
Associate Professor, and as Professor since
1961. During this interval, his major research
interest has been the role of RNA in protein
synthesis. Among his collaborators during
this period were the Swiss biochemist Alfred
Tissières and the French biochemist
François Gros. Much experimental evidence
supporting the messenger RNA concept was
accumulated. His present principal collaborator
is the theoretical physicist Walter Gilbert
who, as Watson expressed it, «has recently
learned the excitement of experimental molecular
biology».
The honours that have to come to Watson
include: the John Collins Warren Prize of
the Massachusetts General Hospital, with
Crick in 1959; the Eli Lilly Award in Biochemistry
in the same year; the Lasker Award, with
Crick and Wilkins in 1960; the Research Corporation
Prize, with Crick in 1962; membership of
the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
and the National Academy of Sciences, and
Foreign membership of the Danish Academy
of Arts and Sciences. He is also a consultant
to the President's Scientific Advisory Committee.
Watson is unmarried. His recreations are
bird-watching and walking.
From Nobel Lectures, Physiology or Medicine
1942-1962, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam,
1964
This autobiography/biography was written
at the time of the award and later published
in the book series Les Prix Nobel/Nobel Lectures.
The information is sometimes updated with
an addendum submitted by the Laureate. To
cite this document, always state the source
as shown above.
For more updated biographical information,
see:
Watson, J.D., The Double Helix. Atheneum, New York, 1968.
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