James Dewey Watson was born in Chicago on April 6, 1928, into “a family that believed in books, birds and the Democratic Party,” as he put it. From his birdwatcher father he inherited an interest in ornithology and a distaste for explanations that didn’t rely on reason or science.
Watson was a precocious child who loved to read, studying books like “The World Telegraph Almanac of Facts.” He entered the University of Chicago on a scholarship at 15, graduated at 19 and earned his doctorate in zoology at Indiana University three years later.
He got interested in genetics at age 17 when he read a book that said genes were the essence of life.
“I thought, ‘Well, if the gene is the essence of life, I want to know more about it,’” he later recalled. “And that was fateful because, otherwise, I would have spent my life studying birds and no one would have heard of me.”
At the time, it wasn’t clear that genes were made of DNA, at least for any life form other than bacteria. But Watson went to Europe to study the biochemistry of nucleic acids like DNA. At a conference in Italy, Watson saw an X-ray image that indicated DNA could form crystals.
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