James Dewey Watson (English: James Dewey Watson, born April 6, 1928), an American molecular biologist and one of the leaders of molecular biology in the 20th century. Together with his colleague Francis Crick, he and Maurice Wilkins won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discovery of the double helix structure of DNA.
Personal experience
James Watson was born in Chicago and was greatly influenced by his father. According to what he said in an article, he received three true lessons from his father: First, he believed that knowledge can free people from "superstition" (i.e., religion); second, he loved bird watching; and third, he supported the Democratic Party. At the age of twelve, he participated in a radio quiz game called "Quiz Kids". At the age of 15, he entered the University of Chicago early as a gifted student, majoring in zoology. Because I read physicist Schr?dinger's popular science book "What is Life?" "(What is Life?), my interest shifted from the migration of migratory birds to genetics.
After receiving a degree from the University of Chicago, he applied to graduate schools at Caltech and Harvard, but to no avail. He improved Indiana University and added the "phages" of Salvador Luria and others. Group", officially involved in the research of genetics. Influenced by this group, Watson began to believe that DNA is the carrier of genes. He received his doctorate in 1950 and went to Copenhagen for postdoctoral research. During this period, he attended an academic conference in Naples and learned about the regular structure of DNA from a lecture by Maurice Wilkins, which strengthened his determination to solve the structure of DNA. In 1951, he moved to the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, met Crick, and together they used X-ray diffraction data to construct a DNA model. Finally, the two proposed the double helix structure of DNA in 1953, and published the results in the journal Nature on April 25 of the same year.
In 1956, Watson went to Harvard University as a teaching assistant and was promoted to professor in 1961. In 1962, together with Crick and Wilkins, he won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their research on the structure of DNA. He published the epoch-making textbook "Molecular Biology of the Gene" in 1965 and "Double Helix" in 1968. In the same year, he began to serve as the general manager of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Long Island, New York. , and shifted the research direction to cancer. He resigned from his position at Harvard in 1976 to focus on his duties at Cold Spring Harbor. In 1988, he was appointed assistant director of the Human Genome Project by the U.S. National Health Service. A year later, he became the first director of the National Center for Human Genome Research, a post he held until 1992. In 1994, he became the first president of Cold Spring Harbor.
Controversy
Watson's unique scientific autobiography "The Double Helix" attracted many readers, but also angered many colleagues. In the book, he criticized many scientists other than himself. His male chauvinist comments about the female scientist Rosalind Franklin were particularly offensive. Therefore, in the "Epilogue" of the book, he made a special comment. Clarifying that "my initial impression of her, Rosalind Franklin, both scientifically and personally... was often wrong." (... my initial impressions of her, both scientific and personal... were often wrong...)
Photo of Watson attending a speech, October 14, 2007, "The Sunday Times" Watson was quoted as saying that black people are inherently less intelligent than white people, so he was not optimistic about the future of Africa. On October 18 of the same year, the Science Museum in London temporarily canceled one of Watson's speeches because of his remarks, saying that his remarks had exceeded the tolerable limit; at the same time, Cold Spring Harbor also suspended him from his duties. Watson immediately apologized unreservedly for his remarks.
In addition, he also thinks that obese people "make people feel bad when they look at them, and they don't want to be hired"; for all "unattractive women" and "stupid people", he believes that they should be treated as Genetic engineering to "treat"; and the hope of aborting fetuses with "potential homosexuality" in the future.