Matthew Meselson earned his Ph.D. under the tutelage of Linus Pauling at the California Institute of Technology. In 1958 with Frank Stahl, Meselson, still in graduate school, experimentally showed the semi-conservative mechanism of DNA replication as predicted by Watson and Crick. Meselson is currently a Professor in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology at Harvard University. His laboratory studies sexual reproduction and genetic recombination, and how and why they are maintained in evolution.