James D. Watson is Chancellor Emeritus at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where he was previously its Director from 1968 to 1993, President from 1994 to 2003, and Chancellor from 2003 to 2007. He spent his undergraduate years at the University of Chicago and received his Ph.D. in 1950 from Indiana University. Between 1950 and 1953, he did postdoctoral research in Copenhagen and Cambridge, England. While at Cambridge, he began the collaboration that resulted in the elucidation of the double-helical structure of DNA in 1953.

(For this discovery, Watson, Francis Crick, and Maurice Wilkins were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1962.) Later in 1953, he went to the California Institute of Technology. He moved to Harvard in 1955, where he taught and did research on RNA synthesis and protein synthesis until 1976. He was the first Director of the National Center for Genome Research of the National Institutes of Health from 1989 to 1992.

Dr. Watson was sole author of the first, second, and third editions of Molecular Biology of the Gene, and a co-author of the fourth, fifth and sixth editions. These were published in 1965, 1970, 1976, 1987, 2003, and 2007, respectively. He is also a co-author of two other textbooks: Molecular Biology of the Cell and Recombinant DNA, as well as author of the celebrated 1968 memoir, The Double Helix, which in 2012 was listed by the Library Of Congress as one of the 88 books that shaped America.

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