James D. Watson won the 1962 Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine along with Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins for discovering the structure of DNA, or deoxyribonucleic acid, which is the carrier of genetic information at the molecular level. Watson and Crick had worked as a team since meeting in the early 1950s, and their research ranks as a fundamental advance in molecular biology. More than thirty years later, Watson became the director of the Human Genome Project, an enterprise devoted to a difficult goal: the description of every human gene, the total of which may number up to one hundred thousand. This is a project that would not be possible without Watson's groundbreaking work on DNA.

James Dewey Watson was born in Chicago, Illinois, on April 6, 1928, to James Dewey and Jean (Mitchell) Watson. He was educated in the Chicago public schools, and during his adolescence became one of...