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A Matter of Health

A biologist's life

by Ruth SoRelle, MPH

If you had listened to the speech by James Watson, PhD, before the "lab meeting" of Baylor College of Medicine Human Genome Sequencing Center director Richard Gibbs, PhD, you might have gotten the impression that he simply happened on the career that has guided his life. Watson, as you might remember, was one of a partnership that received the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for elucidating the helical structure of DNA. It is the basis of modern genetics and molecular biology.

Realize, if you will, that Watson is one of those mythical figures in the field of biomedical research. When word that he was speaking to Gibbs' lab meeting leaked out, people started to gather in BMC's McMillan Auditorium. While he spoke – considerably longer than most lab presentations – no one left.

Born in a home where three things were paramount – birds, books and the Democratic Party – Watson was an early and voracious reader who skipped the last two years of high school and went right into the University of Chicago. He sees nothing unusual in that, and he allows that he was a good, but not outstanding, undergraduate. He anticipated a life in natural history, escaping Chicago and living in a wilderness. That is, until he read a book called What is Life by Erwin Schrodinger. That changed his direction. Francis Crick, PhD, and Maurice Wilkins, PhD, who won the Nobel Prize with him, also read the book at the same time, but in far different locales.

A "C" in calculus put him at the University of Indiana where he produced a thesis of "no interest," he said.

"I am not going to say you should do something unimportant for your PhD," he told the crowd with a hefty sprinkling of graduate students. "But when you are a graduate student, you should learn what's important and what the big problems are and get what further training you need to work on them. By the time I left Indiana, the obvious thing seemed to be to work on DNA."

That quest took him first on a fruitless mission to Denmark and then to Cambridge in England where he met Crick and eventually Wilkins. During the quest, he gathered more tools, learned more and eventually he and Crick constructed the model of the molecule. Their paper in the journal Nature excited little interest until later. He worked on RNA with little effect until recombinant DNA or genetic engineering came online.

Watson was really the godfather of the human genome sequencing project and even directed it in its first years. Because he was doing that and running Cold Spring Harbor, his directorship came under fire and he was ousted.

"It was good for me," said Watson. "I took up tennis."

And he continued to run a world class research operation at Cold Spring Harbor. He is also not averse to inspiring young people. He even inspires those who are older. If there is a message in his talk it is that one should focus on a goal and work toward it, increasing one's knowledge and understanding. Life is an experience and education is a goal.

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