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DR. JAMES WATSON NOBEL PRIZE IN MEDICINE - 1962 “JAMES WATSON EXCELLENCY AWARD” James Watson was a pioneer molecular biologist who is credited, along with Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins, with discovering the double helix structure of the DNA molecule. The trio won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1962 for their work. James Watson was born on April 6, 1928 in Chicago, Illinois. His father, James D. Watson was a businessman and his mother’s name was Jean Mitchell. He attended Horace Mann Grammar School for eight years and South Shore High School for two years. For further education he went to the University of Chicago on a tuition scholarship in 1943. He graduated from Chicago University with a B. S. degree in Zoology in 1947. He could pursue his dream of studying genetics when Indiana University awarded him a fellowship. He did his PhD research at Salvador Luria’s (also his doctoral advisor) laboratory. Luria was one of the leaders of the new Phage group, a movement of geneticists from experiential system to microbial genetics. In those times the prevalent notion was that genes were proteins which could replicate and DNA was the structure that supported it. However, Avery-Macleod-McCarty’s experiment led Watson to believe that DNA was indeed the genetic molecule. His doctoral thesis was on the effect of hard X-rays on bacteriophage multiplication, inspired from geneticists H. J. Muller and T. M. Sonneborn and microbiologist Max Delbruck. He graduated with a PhD in Zoology in 1950. For his post doctoral research he went to Copenhagen University for a year to work with biochemist Herman Kalckar at his laboratory. But as the eld of interest differed for both, Watson shifted his workplace after some months. His new partner was microbial physiologist Ole Maaloe and they did several experiments to explore the structure of the DNA. After much hard work and deliberation they accepted that the result of their rst attempt was inconclusive. Watson realized that the understanding and learning of X-ray diffraction was very important to describe the structure of DNA, hence Luria got him a new postdoctoral research project in England where he could do so. In 1951 he visited the Stazione Zoologica ‘Anton Dohrn’ in Naples. Watson and his partner, Crick, nally deduced the double-helical structure of the DNA in 1953 at the Cavendish Laboratory. The original announcement was made at a conference in Belgium and a paper on the subject was published in the scientic journal ‘Nature’ the same year. Watson presented a paper on the double-helical structure of DNA at the 18th Cold Spring Harbor Symposium on Viruses in June 1953. Many in the audience hadn’t yet heard of the discovery and most of them saw the model for the rst time. In 1956, he became the assistant professor of biology at Harvard University. He received several promotions over the years to nally become the full professor of biology and remained on the faculty till 1976. His personal research was on RNA (Ribonucleic acid) and its role in the transfer of genetic information. James Dewey Watson has been honored with several distinguished awards for his tremendous achievements, including the 1962 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine (with Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins ), John J. Carty Award (1971), Copley Medal (1993) and the Lomonosov Gold Medal (1994). He served as the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory’s director and president for about 35 years. Later on he went on to become the Chancellor and then the Chancellor Emeritus. The National Institutes of Health appointed him as the Head of the Human Genome Project in 1990. However, he resigned two years later as he opposed Bernadine Healy’s (then NIH Director) opinion on applying for patents on brain-specic DNA. He was suspended from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) following his remarks on race and intelligence in October 2007. A week later, he retired on the claims of old age and unanticipated circumstances. Our Thanks to
