Ten Nobels for the future

James Dewey Watson was born in Chicago in 1928. He received his BS in Zoology from the University of Chicago in 1947 and his PhD from the University of Indiana under the supervision of Salvador Luria three years later. He then received a National Research Fellowship to spend a postdoctoral year in Copenhagen. It was during this period, at a symposium held at the Zoological Station in Naples, that he met Maurice Wilkins, whose work stimulated him to direct his research towards the chemical structure of nucleic acids and proteins. Between 1951 and 1956 he worked at the the Cavendish Institute Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, where he began his collaboration with Francis Crick. The two initiated their study of the structure of DNA, which led in March 1953 to the proposal of the double helix configuration, winning world fame for the young Watson and the Nobel Prize in Medicine (with Crick and Wilkins) in 1962.

A member of the Biology Department at Harvard University from 1955 and full professor from 1961, Watson left the post in 1976 to become full-time director of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island. Under his guidance, the laboratory has carried out high-level research in the fields of oncology, molecular biology, cellular biology and neurology. From 1989 to 1992 he worked to launch a worldwide effort to map and sequence the human genome as Director of the National Center for Human Genome Research of the National Institutes of Health.

In addition to many honorary degrees, Watson has received numerous awards, including the Lasker Prize, the Research Corporation Prize and the National Biotechnology Venture Award. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Society of Biological Chemistry, the American Association for Cancer Research and the American Philosophical Society.

1994
The ethical
implications of the
Human Genome Project