Where did james watson work

James D. Watson received a Nobel Prize and went on to do work in cancer research and mapping the human genome. He later came under fire for several controversial remarks on subjects ranging from obesity to race-based intelligence. In , he received a Bachelor of Science degree in zoology and then went on to attend Indiana University in Bloomington, where he received his Ph.

During his graduate studies, Watson was influenced by the work of geneticists H. Muller and T. Sonneborn and microbiologist S. His Ph. That fall, Luria and English biochemist John Kendrew helped Watson move his research to the University of Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory, where he continued his work with X-rays, learning diffraction techniques.

James watson education

He also met molecular biologist Francis Crick, who shared his interest in puzzling out the structure of DNA. The pair began their historic work soon after. Crick's and Watson's first serious effort toward learning the structure of DNA came up short, but their second attempt, concluded in the spring of and resulted in the pair putting forth the double-helical configuration, which resembles a twisting ladder.

Their model also showed how the DNA molecule could duplicate itself, thus answering one of the constant fundamental questions in the field of genetics. Watson and Crick had used the work of English chemist Rosalind Franklin , a colleague of Maurice Wilkins's at King's College London, to arrive at their groundbreaking discovery, however, her contribution to their findings would go largely unrecognized until after her death.

Franklin had compiled several unpublished working papers describing the structural qualities of DNA, and with her student Raymond Gosling had taken an X-ray diffraction image of DNA, known as Photo 51, which would become crucial evidence in identifying the structure of DNA. Without Franklin's knowledge or permission, Wilkins shared Photo 51 and her data with Watson.

Although Watson and Crick included a footnote in their article acknowledging that they were "stimulated by a general knowledge" of Franklin's unpublished contributions, it was Watson, Crick and Wilkins who went on to receive a Nobel Prize for their work in , four years after Franklin had died of ovarian cancer.