Inspirational Quotes by James D. Watson (American Biologist)

James D. Watson (b.1928,) fully James Dewey Watson, is an American geneticist and biophysicist. Together with Francis Crick, he proposed the double-helix model for the structure of the DNA molecule. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Crick and Maurice Wilkins in 1962.

Born in Chicago, Watson studied zoology at the University of Chicago. As a postgraduate at Indiana University, he studied under biophysicists Hermann Joseph Muller, and microbiologist Salvador Luria. He spent 1951–53 at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, U.K., and from 1955 taught at Harvard, where he became professor of biology in 1961. He was director of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York (1968–94,) then president (1994–2004,) and he served actively as director of the National Center for Human Genome Research (1989–92.)

While in Cambridge in 1951, Watson worked with Francis Crick on the structure of DNA. They published their model of a two-stranded helical molecule in 1953. Each strand consists of a series of nucleotide bases wound around a common center, with the strands linked together by hydrogen bonds. For this work, Watson was awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Crick and molecular biologist Maurice Wilkins.

Watson wrote a personal account of discovering the DNA structure in The Double Helix (1968.) His textbooks The Molecular Biology of the Gene (1965) and Recombinant DNA (1984) remain standard works.

In 2007, Watson sparked controversy by making public remarks that race and intelligence are connected. In 2019, the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory cut ties with Watson and revoked all titles and honors conferred.

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