United States geneticist James Dewey Watson shared the 1962 Nobel Prize with Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins for his work to discover the molecular structure on DNA. Crick and Watson are intertwined in the public mind like the structure of DNA they discovered at Cambridge in 1953. DNA research promises the possibility of personalised cancer therapies. Watson was born in Chicago in 1928 and arrived in England aged 23 to join the Cavendish laboratory, which was leading the way in DNA research in the 1950s. She had wanted to patent the gene sequences emerging from the project, something that would have potentially stymied future research.

Source: Otago Daily Times January 03, 2026 03:34 UTC