49 Fun Facts About James Watson

With which two scientists did Watson share the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine?

Crick and Wilkins. Rosalind Franklin, whose X-ray work had been vital, had died in 1958 at the age of 37, and the Nobel Prize is not awarded posthumously.

In which American city was Watson born in 1928?

Chicago. He went through its public schools on the South Side and stayed in the city for college, entering the University of Chicago on a scholarship at just 15.

As a boy Watson appeared on which popular radio show for bright children?

He was already fascinated by birdwatching, a hobby shared with his father.

Which field did the young Watson originally consider majoring in?

Ornithology. Birdwatching with his father was his boyhood passion, and he entered college meaning to study birds before genetics won him over.

Reading which 1944 book as a student turned Watson toward genetics?

What Is Life? Its author, the physicist Erwin Schrodinger, argued that heredity must be written in a kind of molecular code, and Francis Crick credited the same slim book with pulling him into biology.

Watson and Crick's 1953 paper hinted that DNA's structure lets genes do what?

Replicate. 'It has not escaped our notice,' they wrote, that the pairing of the bases 'immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism': each strand is a template for the other.

Watson described the luckiest thing that ever happened to him as the fact that his father did what?

Didn't believe in God. It left him, Watson said, with no hang-ups about souls; he stopped going to Mass at 11, a year after his First Communion.

Watson took his PhD in 1950 from a university in which state?

Indiana. He arrived in Bloomington at 19 on a zoology fellowship and left three years later with a doctorate, convinced that heredity would be understood only through its chemistry.

Who was Watson's doctoral advisor?

Salvador Luria. The microbiologist later shared a Nobel Prize of his own, and it was he who arranged the Cambridge posting that led Watson to the double helix.

Watson's PhD research involved using X-rays to inactivate what?

Bacterial viruses. Known as phages, they were the chosen tool of a circle of geneticists who believed that something so simple would show what heredity is made of.

The 'Phage Group' that Watson joined was centred on which physicist turned geneticist?

Max Delbruck. Trained in atomic physics in Germany, he argued that the simplest living things would reveal how genes work, and shared the 1969 Nobel Prize for the research that followed.

In 1949 the conventional view Watson was taught held that genes were made of what?

Proteins. DNA was written off as a dull, repetitive molecule with a merely structural role, though experiments five years earlier had already pointed to it as the carrier of heredity.

Watson spent his 1950-51 postdoctoral year in which European city?

Copenhagen. He was sent to learn the chemistry of nucleic acids, but his interests never matched his host's, and a trip abroad that spring showed him a better route to DNA.

At a 1951 meeting in which country did an X-ray picture of DNA first convince Watson its structure could be solved?

Italy. At a symposium in Naples a British physicist showed a diffraction pattern from crystalline DNA, proof that the molecule had a regular structure, and Watson changed the direction of his research.

Watson met Francis Crick at which Cambridge laboratory in 1951?

The Cavendish. Watson was 23 and newly arrived; Crick, twelve years older, was still working for his doctorate, and both found they would rather talk about DNA than do their set work.

Who first announced the double helix publicly, at a Solvay conference in Belgium in April 1953?

Lawrence Bragg. The head of the pair's laboratory broke the news to a select gathering of leading researchers, more than two weeks before the paper appeared in print.

Watson and Crick announced the double helix in 1953 in which scientific journal?

Nature. The short paper of 25 April 1953 carried a single illustration, the now-famous spiral, which was drawn by Crick's wife Odile, an artist.

Which future Nobel laureate drove from Oxford in April 1953 to see the new DNA model?

Sydney Brenner. He called the sight of the model the watershed of his scientific life, and within a few years he had joined Crick in Cambridge, where the two helped work out how the genetic code is read.

Rosalind Franklin told Watson and Crick that which part of DNA had to be on the outside of the molecule?

The sugar-phosphate backbones. Her measurements of how readily DNA takes up water showed that the water-loving phosphates must face outward; the pair's first model had put them in the middle.

Watson and Crick admitted in 1954 that their structure would have been 'most unlikely, if not impossible' without data from which laboratory?

King's College London. The measurements came chiefly from Rosalind Franklin's X-ray work there, some of it reaching Cambridge in a research-council report passed to the pair by a senior colleague.

The Double Helix opens with Watson saying he has never seen Francis Crick in what kind of mood?

Modest. Crick was among those who protested against the manuscript, yet the memoir came out in 1968 and became a worldwide bestseller.

Watson spent two decades, until 1976, on the biology faculty of which university?

Harvard. He pressed its biology toward molecules, and for his last eight years there he was also running Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, which he had taken over in 1968.

Which British distinction did Watson, an American citizen, receive nearly fifty years after the double helix?

A knighthood, though an honorary one: as a foreign citizen he could put KBE after his name but could not style himself Sir James.

After his own Molecular Biology of the Gene, Watson co-wrote a 1983 textbook called Molecular Biology of the what?

Cell. Written with Bruce Alberts and other scientists, it set out to join cell biology to the newer molecular science and became the standard textbook of its field.

What was Watson's original working title for the book that became The Double Helix?

Honest Jim. His two fellow laureates objected so strongly to the manuscript that his own university's press dropped it; the Modern Library later ranked it seventh among the century's nonfiction.

Which Hollywood actor played Watson in the BBC's 1987 drama Life Story?

Jeff Goldblum. Horizon, the BBC's science documentary series, made the film as a full-length drama from Watson's own memoir, and it won the 1988 BAFTA for best single drama.

At Cold Spring Harbor Watson shifted the laboratory's research emphasis to the study of what?

Cancer. He concentrated the laboratory's efforts on the disease soon after taking charge in 1968, and went on to build it into a world centre for research in molecular biology.

Watson resigned from Cold Spring Harbor in 2007 after linking race genetically to what?

Intelligence. He told a British newspaper he was 'inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa'; he lost his post as chancellor, and in 2019, after repeating the claim on film, his emeritus titles too.

Watson was the first head of which effort at the National Institutes of Health, launched in 1990?

The Human Genome Project. It set out to read all three billion letters of human DNA and declared the job done in 2003, fifty years after the double helix paper.

Watson quit the NIH job after clashing with NIH director Bernadine Healy over what?

Patenting gene sequences. He called the agency's plan to patent stretches of human DNA crazy, arguing they belonged to everyone; he resigned in 1992 as questions were raised about his own biotech shares.

Which geneticist took over Watson's job at the National Institutes of Health in 1993?

Francis Collins. A doctor who had helped track down the cause of cystic fibrosis, he saw the great sequencing effort through to its finish in 2003 and later ran the whole NIH.

In which Cambridge pub did Crick reportedly announce that he and Watson had found 'the secret of life'?

The Eagle. It was the regular lunch spot for the laboratory round the corner; the story comes from Watson's memoir, and a blue plaque by the door now marks 28 February 1953.

Which auction house sold Watson's Nobel medal in 2014 to a billionaire who then returned it?

Christie's. Watson was the first living laureate to auction his medal; the buyer, Alisher Usmanov, who paid more than $4 million, said the scientist deserved to keep it and handed it back.

Which American chemist published a mistaken triple-helix model of DNA weeks before Watson and Crick's double helix?

Linus Pauling. He had already beaten Cambridge to the alpha helix, and the head of the laboratory there, unwilling to lose to him twice, threw his weight behind Watson and Crick's push on DNA.

What was the title of Watson's 2007 memoir of lessons from a life in science?

Avoid Boring People. Each chapter ends with a list of 'remembered lessons' for the ambitious scientist, which led one reviewer to call it an unlikely book of manners.

Which fellow biologist once described Watson as 'the most unpleasant human being I had ever met'?

E. O. Wilson. The two clashed as young professors over whether their department should back molecules or whole organisms; decades later Wilson called it old history and described them as friends.

Watson often spoke about his son Rufus in order to encourage research into which condition?

Schizophrenia. Rufus first needed hospital treatment at 16, and Watson wrote that the fear the cause lay in his son's genes drove his later campaign for genetic research into mental illness.

Watson wrote in Time that he had donated $1,000 to whose 2016 presidential campaign?

Bernie Sanders. Watson, then 87, wrote that a campaign flyer had asked him for $45 and that its appeal to fundamental fairness moved him to send a cheque for $1,000 instead.

In Watson's double helix, adenine always pairs with which base?

Thymine. The pairing explained a puzzle found by the chemist Erwin Chargaff: in any sample of DNA the amounts of adenine and thymine match, as do those of guanine and cytosine.

Before solving DNA, Watson used X-rays in 1952 to show the helical build of which plant virus?

Tobacco mosaic virus. His pictures showed its building blocks stacked in a spiral, useful practice for thinking about helices; Rosalind Franklin later made the same virus her main subject.

Which Nobel laureate's presence decided Watson's choice of university for his doctorate in 1947?

Hermann Muller. He had just won the prize for showing that X-rays cause mutations, yet it was a younger teacher there, working on microbes instead of fruit flies, who became Watson's supervisor.

Which future Nobel laureate, honoured for 'knockout' mice, did his PhD under Watson?

Mario Capecchi. He took his doctorate in Watson's laboratory in 1967; his later method of switching off chosen stretches of DNA in mice became a standard way to learn what each one does.

On taking his National Institutes of Health post, Watson announced special funding for research into what?

Ethical and social issues. He announced the idea, unprompted, at the press conference on his appointment, and the research programme it led to, known as ELSI, began in 1990.

Watson presented the double helix at a June 1953 symposium on what subject?

Viruses. The double helix was a last-minute addition to the annual meeting at Cold Spring Harbor, whose organisers judged the newly published structure too relevant to the programme to leave out.

In 2020 Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory removed Watson's name from which part of the institution?

Its graduate school. The Watson School of Biological Sciences went back to its original name by a vote of the trustees, the year after the laboratory cut its last ties with him.

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, run by Watson from 1968, is on which island?

Long Island. He took over a laboratory in financial trouble and led it for some 35 years as director and then president, making it a world centre of molecular biology.

Which DNA-sequencing rival did Watson fall out with at the NIH over his use of EST fragments?

Craig Venter. He left the agency and later raced the government's effort with a company of his own, and in 2007 the two rivals became the first people to have their own DNA read in full.

Watson's laboratory was one of two teams to demonstrate the existence of which molecule in 1961?

Messenger RNA, which carries DNA's instructions to the ribosome. The two teams published their proof side by side in May 1961; six decades later the same molecule became the basis of Covid vaccines.

In 2003 Watson was one of 22 Nobel laureates to sign which document?

The Humanist Manifesto. The statement, drawn up by the American Humanist Association, argues for a good life guided by reason and compassion without religion; his old partner Francis Crick signed it too.