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
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 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 and 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 first published in the book series Les Prix Nobel. It was later edited and republished in Nobel Lectures. 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.
Copyright © The Nobel Foundation 1962
James Watson
