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The Rediff Interview/Dr James Watson

'An eccentric and aggressive worker'

James Watson was born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1928. His father was a businessman whose interests leaned towards philosophy and ornithology. That, and the depression, saw Watson Sr go through some bad times: he even had to sell his car.

Young Watson inherited the dislike of big business. "Capitalism was considered cruel and I was sympathetic towards socialism," he says, clarifying that he didn't lean towards Communism either due to the excesses practised in Russia.

Living in an environment redolent of the library, he also inherited his father's love for birds. Otherwise Watson grew up unspectacularly. Teachers thought him bright, but the boy had a more modest opinion of himself.

"I was a fanatical birdwatcher," he admits. But when he started doing "real science" instead of the "play science" of birdwatching, his interest waned. It died out altogether when he went to Denmark and England where he could identify few of the birds.

When he was 15, he was absorbed in a University of Chicago programme that took in children after two years of high school. Watson enrolled and, at 19, was a bachelor of science in zoology, three years later, a Ph D.

It was during a stint at Cambridge University's Cavendish laboratory, that he learnt X-ray crystallography, partly due to the efforts of his collaborator 35-year-old Francis Crick who, like many physicists of the day, had decided to shift out of mainline physics. Undecided first whether he should work on biochemistry or the human brain, he finally settled for the former.

Crick had a profound influence on Watson, who had earned the reputation as an eccentric and aggressive worker. Crick impressed the importance of crystallography on Watson, which later proved invaluable in the final, correct, model of DNA they postulated.

According to Watson, their team had the advantage of being close to another team working on the same subject -- consisting of Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin. There has been much debate over why Franklin, who died of ovarian cancer a few years later, did not share a posthumous Nobel Prize in 1962 along with the other three winners. Part of the problem was apparently her intransigence which made her life with others difficult. But in her final days, she also spent some time living with Crick and his wife Odie.

After Cambridge, Watson taught at Harvard and Caltech and later became director of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, bringing around an institute in trouble with his hitherto undiscovered administrative talents and helping it make great strides in tumour virology. He also wrote a book, The Double Helix, which ruffled a few feathers in academia.

He took over the National Center for Human Genome Research in 1989 and left it after seeing it well on its way. Currently, he's back at his old job as president of Cold Spring Harbor.

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