James Dewey Watson - Part I
June 14, 2010
James Dewey Watson was born on April 6, 1928, in Chicago, Illinois, where he was also raised. His parents were James D. Watson, a businessman, and Jean Mitchell. James was educated in the Chicago public schools. In 1942, during his adolescence he appeared on Quiz Kids a popular radio show that challenged precocious youngsters to answer questions. James attended South Shore &#&High School&#&, where he was considered a largely S (superior) student. Being such a good student he was permitted by Robert Hutchins to enroll the University of Chicago at the age of 15. In his autobiography entitled "Avoid Boring People" he says how comfortable he felt studying at the University of Chicago. As a young boy James shared with his father the bird watching hobby, and he was decided by those days to study ornithology. He was sure of this decision till in 1946 he read the book "What is Life?" written by Erwin Schrodinger. This book had a great impact in the young James and he decided to study genetics instead of ornithology. In 1947 James earned his Bachelor of Science degree in Zoology from the University of Chicago. The same year James received a Fellowship for graduate Zoology at &#&Indiana University&#& in Bloomington where he obtained his Ph.D. degree in Zoology in 1950, at age 22. Around the late 1930's, Salvador Luria, D. Hershey and Max Delbruck took up the study of bacteriophages. Their meeting that took place around 1940 marked the origin of the "Phage Group" which was an informal network of biologists that became an important movement of geneticists from experimental systems towards microbial genetics. Salvador Luria and Max Delbruck were the leaders of this "Phage Group" which contributed heavily to bacterial genetics and the origins of molecular biology in the mid-20th century. &#&Indiana University&#& had several remarkable geneticists who could have been important to Watson's intellectual development, but he was drawn to the university by the presence of the Nobel laureate Hermann Joseph Muller, who had demonstrated twenty years earlier that X rays cause mutation. At &#&Indiana University&#& James was mainly attracted to the work of Salvador Luria. Luria was an Italian-born microbiologist who was then on the staff of Indiana's Bacteriology Department and eventually shared a Nobel prize for his work on the Luria-Delbruck experiment concerning the nature of genetic mutations. |