James D. Watson

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 original of English descent and had lived in the midwest for several generations. His mother’s father was a Scottish-born tailor 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 South Shore High School for two years. He then received a tuition scholarship to the University of Chicago and entered their experimental four-year college in the summer of 1943.

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 by the geneticists H. J. Muller and T. M. Sonneborn and by S. E. Luria, the Italian-born microbiologist then on Indiana’s Bacteriology Department staff. 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 and the remainder with the microbiologist Ole Maaløe. Again he worked with bacterial viruses, attempting to study the fate of the 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 and proteins. Fortunately, this proved possible when Luria arranged with John Kendrew in early August 1951 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 a careful examination of the possible stereochemical configurations of polynucleotide chains. Their first serious effort was unsatisfactory in the late fall of 1951. Their second effort, based upon more experimental evidence and a better appreciation of the nucleic acid literature, resulted, early in March 1953, in the proposal of the complementary double-helical configuration.