James Dewey Watson (born April 6, 1928) is an American molecular biologist, best known as one of the co-discoverers of the structure of DNA. Watson, Francis 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”. He studied at the University of Chicago and Indiana University and subsequently worked at the University of Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory in England where he first met Francis Crick.
In 1956 he became a junior member of Harvard University’s Biological Laboratories until 1976, but in 1968 served as Director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, New York and shifted its research emphasis to the study of cancer. In 1994 he became its President for ten years, and then subsequently served as its Chancellor until 2007, when he was forced into retirement by controversy over several comments about race and intelligence. Between 1988 and 1992 he was associated with the National Institutes of Health, helping to establish the Human Genome Project. He has written many science books, including the seminal textbook The Molecular Biology of the Gene (1965) and his bestselling book The Double Helix (1968) about the DNA Structure discovery.
Biography
Watson was born in Chicago, Illinois, on April 6, 1928, the son of a businessman, also named James Dewey Watson, and Margaret Jean Mitchell. His father was of midwestern English descent. His mother’s father Lauchlin Mitchell, a tailor, was from Glasgow, Scotland, and her mother, Lizzie Gleason, was the child of Irish parents from Tipperary. Watson was fascinated with bird watching, a hobby he shared with his father. Watson appeared on Quiz Kids, a popular radio show that challenged precocious youngsters to answer questions. Thanks to the liberal policy of University president Robert Hutchins, he enrolled at the University of Chicago at the age of 15. After reading Erwin Schrodinger’s book What Is Life? in 1946, Watson changed his professional ambitions from the study of ornithology to genetics. He earned his B.S. in Zoology from the University of Chicago in 1947. In his autobiography, Avoid Boring People, Watson describes the University of Chicago as an idyllic academic institution where he was instilled with the capacity for critical thought and an ethical compulsion not to suffer fools who impeded his search for truth, in contrast to his description of his later work at Harvard University.
American geneticist who studied the Neurospora red bread mold. By subjecting the mold to X-rays, he caused it to mutate. He then observed that some mold lost the ability to produce a particular organic compound in needed to survive. By adding different but similar compounds and seeing if the mold used it, he could unravel the chemical reactions by which the mold synthesized needed chemicals. Beadle concluded that the characteristic function of the gene was to control the synthesis of a particular enzyme. For this hypothesis, which he published with Tatum, he shared the 1958 Nobel prize in medicine with Tatum and Lederberg. 
Theodosius Grygorovych Dobzhansky, also known as T. G. Dobzhansky, and sometimes 
Canadian-American physician who obtained his medical degree from Columbia University in 1904 and joined the Rockefeller Institute in 1913. Avery studied a curious phenomenon that had been observed in pneumococci (pneumonia-causing bacteria) with a smooth coat (S) and those with a rough coat (R). It seemed that the R strain lacked an enzyme needed to make the carbohydrate capsule encasing the smooth strain. When a nonliving extract of the S strain was mixed with live R strains an injected into a mouse, it was found that that mouse’s tissue would eventually contain live S bacteria, thus indicating that the S strain contained some factor containing an enzyme necessary to convert the R strain into the S strain. 