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James Dewey Watson 1928–, American biologist and educator, b. Chicago, Ill., grad. Univ. of Chicago, 1947, Ph.D. Univ. of Indiana, 1950. With F. H. C. Crick he began (1951) research on the molecular structure of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) at the Cavendish Laboratory of Cambridge Univ. Their findings, published in 1953, resulted in the joint award to them and to M. H. F. Wilkins (on whose laboratory's in X-ray diffraction their studies were partly based) of the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Watson joined the faculty at Harvard in 1955 and in 1968 became director of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York. From 1989 to 1992 he was director of the National Center for Human Genome Research, which undertook the Human Genome Project. His chief researches have been in the fields of genetics, bacteriophage reproduction, and cancer.
See his The Double Helix (1968), The DNA Story (1981, with J. Tooze), and Genes, Girls, and Gamow: After the Double Helix (2002); biography by V. K. McElheny, Watson and DNA: Making a Scientific Revolution (2003); H. F. Judson, The Eighth Day of Creation (expanded ed. 1996).
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