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James Dewey Watson (1928-)
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 taylor 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.
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 1952.
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 fate 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.
Information courtesy of http://www.nobel.se/laureates/medicine-1962-2-bio.html.