James D. Watson

James Dewey Watson was awarded the Nobel in Medicine or Physiology for his work in discovering the double helix structure of DNA along with Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins in 1962.

Watson has written an autobiography of his journey to uncover the nature of DNA, “The Double Helix” which is a short but engaging insight into the foibles and aspirations of a young man completely lacking in any self-aggrandizement and his humorous and irreverent perspective into one of the major scientific accomplishments in the 20th century.

Watson was born in Chicago, Ill., on April 6th, 1928, where he attended Horace Mann Grammar School and then two years at South Shore High School. He received a scholarship to the University of Chicago, entering their experimental four-year college in the summer of 1943 and receiving his B.Sc. in Zoology in 1947. He then acquired a fellowship for graduate study in Zoology at Indiana University in Bloomington, where he received his Ph.D. degree in 1950.

During his time at Indiana, he studied under Italian microbiologist S. E. Luria studying the effect of X-rays on bactriophages. He then spent a desultory post-doctoral year in Copenhagen (Sept. 1950 to Sept. 1951) as a Merck Fellow of the National Research Council studying with the biochemist Herman Kalckar, and then microbiologist Ole Maaløe. However, as he tells it, he was not getting anywhere close to his goal of discovering the nature of DNA and was ready to move on. He was also not impressed with his capacity for learning chemistry.

At a Symposium at the Zoological Station at Naples in May 1951, he met Maurice Wilkins who was presenting a paper on the X-ray diffraction pattern of crystalline DNA. This was the first time Watson came into contact with this approach and provided him with a different perspective on uncovering the nature of DNA. It was to prove a critical development in his work. His post-doc supervisor, S. E. Luria was then able to acquire Watson a position working with John Kendrew at the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge, James Clerk Maxwell's and Ernest Rutherford’s old stomping grounds. Soon after starting work at the Cavendish in August of 1951 he met Francis Crick. Watson’s research at the Cavendish was in structural chemistry of nucleic acids and proteins. At that time, Linus Pauling was the foremost authority in structural chemistry, a situation that was to lead Crick and Watson into a race with Pauling to uncover the secrets of DNA.

Watson and Crick hit it off immediately. Crick had very little intellectual support for his theories about DNA – surprisingly enough, the intense interest we associate nowadays with DNA were not shared by the scientific community at the time. Outside of some researchers at King’s College, London (primarily Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin) and Linus Pauling in California, research in DNA was not a major emphasis in the 40’s and 50s.

Watson and Crick were soon plotting to beat the science colossus Linus Pauling to the goal line. Watson’s boss at the Cavendish, John Kendrew, quickly saw that Watson was not going to be much help in his research into proteins as he spent his time with Crick in the quest for the secrets of DNA.

Prior to his work in biology, Crick was a physicist but had switched after WWII. Watson’s reputation as a ‘phage’ man (bacteriophage) was the sort of support Crick needed to verify his aspirations in biology. This was at a time when research in separate fields was more disconnected than was to later become the norm.

Crick’s intellect was legendary. He was a true inter-disciplinarian and he was knowledgeable about crystallography, to Watson, an intimidatingly complex subject about which he knew little or nothing.

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