Well, my connection with the worm traces back to a fateful summer in Woods Hole, the other ocean lab. So I was a M.D./Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago and went to Woods Hole to take the physiology course because I was frustrated with medical school And I was only allowed to sign up for the first six weeks. And Sydney [Brenner] wasn’t even there the first six weeks of the course. But I was—and I had a great time. And Andrew [Albert?? CHECK] Szent-Gyorgy who was the course leader said, “No, you’ve got to stay for the second half because this guy—this crazy guy, Sydney Brenner is going to come and you’ve got to meet him. And it’s going to be, you know, it’s going to be great fun. And besides I want to keep playing tennis with you!” Because we did. We played a lot.

So anyway so I stayed for the second half. Sydney was indeed captivating. He sat down and talked to us every day at lunchtime about whatever we asked him to the day before. And he just gave us—we discovered every range of topic in biology. This was to a group of ten students or something like that.

And he gave his first public lecture on the worm that summer. And I just thought it was fantastic. And I asked him if I could come and be a postdoc there. And he said, “Well, write to me when you get home.”

This was ’69. And so I did. I went and became a postdoc in 1972 to work on the worm.

I mean doing the worm sequence with John, just the whole fifteen years of doing the worm map and the worm sequence with John was just a wonderful fifteen years.

Dr. Robert Waterston is a biologist best known for his involvement in the Human Genome Project. He has also served as chairman of the NIH’s Molecular Cytology Study Section and as a member of the NIH Advisory Council. He carried out his undergraduate work at Princeton University in 1965 and received both his MD and PhD degrees from the University of Chicago in 1972. His post-doctoral work was completed at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge.

In 1965, Dr. Waterston received his bachelor's degree in engineering from Princeton University. In 1972, he received an M.D. and a PhD in pathology from the University of Chicago. After his post-doctoral fellowship at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, he joined the Washington University faculty in 1976 where he is currently the James S. McDonnel Professor of Genetics, head of the Department of Genetics, and director of the School of Medicine’s Genome Sequencing Center, which he founded in 1993. In 2003, Dr. Waterston took on the role of Chair of the Department of Genome Sciences at the University of Washington.

In 1989, Dr. Waterston and John Sulston received one of the first grants for the Human Genome Project to sequence the nematode worm genome. His project saw so much success that Dr. Waterston received funding from the National Human Genome Research Institute to carry out sequencing of the human genome at his laboratory. Dr. Waterston and Sulston became the first to completely sequence the genome of an animal, publishing the nematode worm sequence in 1998.

Dr. Waterston has received awards and recognition for his work including the Genetics Society of America’s Beadle Award in 2000, the International Gairdner Award in 2002, the Dan David Prize in 2002, the Alfred P. Sloan Award from the GM Cancer Research Foundation in 2002, and the Gruber Prize in Genetics in 2005.