James Watson was born in Chicago in 1928. He studied zoology at the University of Chicago, and was awarded his Ph.D. at Indiana University in 1950. Between 1950 and 1953 he worked at Copenhagen and Cambridge, where together with Francis Crick he solved the structure of DNA, for which they received a share of the Nobel Prize in 1962. His other publications include THE MOLECULAR BIOLOGY OF THE GENE and THE MOLECULAR BIOLOGY OF THE CELL. He lives in the USA.