
Among his professors was Louis Leon Thurstone from whom Watson learned about factor analysis, which he would later reference on his controversial views on race. Thanks to the liberal policy of university president Robert Hutchins, he enrolled at the University of Chicago, where he was awarded a tuition scholarship, at the age of 15. Watson appeared on Quiz Kids, a popular radio show that challenged bright youngsters to answer questions. He was fascinated with bird watching, a hobby shared with his father, so he considered majoring in ornithology. Watson grew up on the south side of Chicago and attended public schools, including Horace Mann Grammar School and South Shore High School. Watson said, "The luckiest thing that ever happened to me was that my father didn't believe in God." Raised Catholic, he later described himself as "an escapee from the Catholic religion". His mother's father, Lauchlin Mitchell, a tailor, was from Glasgow, Scotland, and her mother, Lizzie Gleason, was the child of parents from County Tipperary, Ireland.

Watson, a businessman descended mostly from colonial English immigrants to America. Watson was born in Chicago on April 6, 1928, as the only son of Jean (née Mitchell) and James D.
#Whatson org professional#
4.2 Professional and honorary affiliations.


From 1956 to 1976, Watson was on the faculty of the Harvard University Biology Department, promoting research in molecular biology.įrom 1968 Watson served as director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL), greatly expanding its level of funding and research. Following a post-doctoral year at the University of Copenhagen with Herman Kalckar and Ole Maaløe, Watson worked at the University of Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory in England, where he first met his future collaborator Francis Crick. Watson earned degrees at the University of Chicago ( BS, 1947) and Indiana University (PhD, 1950). In subsequent years, it has been recognized that Watson and his colleagues did not properly attribute colleague Rosalind Franklin for her contributions to the discovery of the double helix structure. Watson, Crick and Maurice Wilkins were awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material". In 1953, he co-authored with Francis Crick the academic paper proposing the double helix structure of the DNA molecule. James Dewey Watson (born April 6, 1928) is an American molecular biologist, geneticist, and zoologist.
