James D. Watson on Ray Gesteland
  James D. Watson     Biography    
Recorded: 25 Jul 2003

Well, I first met him, you know, he doesn’t have a sparkling personality. Very solid, but—really very, very good but you wouldn’t know it from—he doesn’t advertise himself. But he always, you know, had good ambitions, a very decent person. A very good experimentalist. He can do things. Certainly when he, you know, Ray went to Tissieres lab and then I recommended him to John Cairns. I thought, you know, he would be good, you know, for Cold Spring—he was good. And, you know, now he is vice-president of the University of Utah or something for science, so you know, he’s respected. Yeah, he was the sort of person you could allow to have some power and he won’t misuse it. Not in an intentional way. And, you know, not at all bothered by, you know, trying to hire people who were superficially brighter than he. You know, he wants—

A member of the Time 100 ‘Century’s Greatest Minds’, Dr. James Watson’s life in science has taken him from the revolutionary discovery of the structure of DNA to the head of the National Institute of Health’s Human Genome Project, and places between.

Dr. Watson was born in 1928 in Chicago, and enrolled at the University of Chicago when he was just 15. His graduate studies in genetics with Salvador Luria took him to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory for the first time in 1948. His graduate work would eventually bring him to the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, where, together with fellow scientists Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin, Francis Crick and Dr. Watson would discover how the four-nucleotide bases arrange themselves to create the unique identities of each living organism. Their account of the structure of DNA, published in Nature, would win them the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology. Watson's bestselling account of his time at Cavendish, The Double Helix, was named the No. 7 best work of nonfiction by the Modern Library.

Watson spent two decades at Harvard University, where he penned the revolutionary biology textbook, Molecular Biology of the Gene in 1965. Dr. Watson's distinguished academic career led him to the directorship of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 1968, where he has pushed the lab towards important steps in cancer research and the causes of mental disease. From 1988 to 1992, Dr. Watson was appointed to head the National Institute of Health in the Human Genome Project. Dr. Watons's genome was the first to be decoded and was made public as part of the project in 2007. A member of the National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society, he has received the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the National Medal of Science. After forty years as a brilliant educator and administrator, Dr. Watson retired as Chancellor of the laboratory in 2007.