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James Watson Research Paper

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Alexandra Gehrs
James Watson
James Watson was born on April 6th, 1928, in Chicago, Illinois. He was the only son of Jean and James D. Watson, who was a businessman from English descent. He had one sister named Elizabeth Jean Watson, whom he loved very much. Watson grew up on the southside of Chicago and attended the public schools in the area.Watson attended Horace Mann Grammar School for eight years, and South Shore High School for two years. During his childhood, Watson was fascinated with bird watching with his father, pointing out all of the different types of birds and their ways of living.
In 1943, he received a scholarship to the University of Chicago, where he enrolled at fifteen years old. Four years later, he graduated with his Bachelor of Science degree in Zoology. He then attended Indiana University to work on his PhD in Zoology. He graduated in 1950 from Indiana and started to transform his childhood love of bird watching into genetics. During his time at Indiana, Watson had begun to work with X-ray imaging. His thesis was a study based on the effect of intense X-rays on bacterial reproduction, which led him to study more in depth with X-ray imaging and observing photographic patterns created by them.
In the fall of 1951, Watson met Maurice Wilkins at Cambridge University. He saw for the first time crystalline DNA’s X-ray diffraction …show more content…
Unfortunately, Rosalind Franklin had passed away four years earlier, making her unable to be nominated for the Nobel Prize and for her work going almost unnoticed. Six years later, Watson wrote a book describing the events leading up to the discovery of the structure of DNA, however, he gave little mention to Franklin’s work and her contributions to his discovery. Both Wilkins and Crick disapproved of the book saying that it did not give credit to Franklin’s work, and was a dishonor to her

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