James Watson, b. 1928. The American biologist was a discoverer of the double-helical structure of the deoxyribonucleic acid molecule. (The Library of Congress.)

Co-discoverer of the molecular structure of DNA, James Watson (b. 1928) was born in Chicago on April 6, and became a controversial figure in debates about the social and ethical implications of genetic research. Watson received his Ph.D. in zoology from Indiana University in 1950. His partnership with Maurice Wilkins and Francis Crick led to the 1953 discovery of the complementary double-helix configuration of the DNA molecule, for which the three researchers shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine. In 1968 Watson was named director and in 1994 president of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, which he shaped into a leading center of research on the genetic basis of cancer. In 1988 Watson was appointed Associate Director for Human Genome Research at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), where he...