Watson, James Dewey

James D. Watson (1928) is an American-born scientist. While at the University of Chicago, he became fascinated with genetics, in particular the problem of the structure of the gene. In 1953, while on a postdoctoral fellowship at Cambridge University, he and Francis HC Crick deduced the double-helix structure of DNA. Watson spent the rest of his career advancing DNA as the fundamental molecule of living systems, through research and teaching, pedagogical and popular writing, and administration. In 1968, he became director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a weathered, storied, seaside biology lab on New Yorks Long Island where he had spent summers as a student. Watson rejuvenated the lab, making it into a center for cancer research, then general molecular biology. From 1988 to 1992, he directed the National Center for Human Genome Research, now the National Human Genome Research Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health. In 2007, he resigned from Cold Spring Harbor over controversy surrounding remarks about race, intelligence, and heredity.