James Watson
First Director of the Human Genome Project
From childhood, James D. Watson was a keen birdwatcher and originally studied zoology. During postdoctoral work at Copenhagen, Watson visited a seminar in Naples where he met Maurice Wilkins and he first saw the X-ray diffraction pattern of crystalline DNA - an experience that spurred him further to research nucleic acid and proteins. Watson moved to laboratories in Cambridge where he and Francis Crick identified the structure of DNA, for which they shared the Nobel Prize in 1962 for Physiology or Medicine with Wilkins. Wilkins, along with Rosalind Franklin, provided data on which the structure of DNA is based. Watson published a book based on this discovery called The Double Helix in 1968. In 1989, Watson became Director of the National Institute of Health (NIH) Human Genome Program and the full human genome sequence was completed in 2003. Until recently, Watson was President of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, of which he had been the full-time Director from 1976-1994. In 2007 Watson had his genome sequenced by Connecticut-based company 454, and retired from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.
