97 years ago today, on April 6, 1928 (February 16, 1928), James Dewey Watson was born. James Dewey Watson (born April 6, 1928), an American molecular biologist, was one of the leaders of 20th century molecular biology. He and his colleague Francis Crick won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Maurice Wilkins for their discovery of the double helix structure of DNA. James Watson was born in Chicago and was greatly influenced by his father. According to his own article, he received three biographies from his father: one, he believed that knowledge could free people from "superstition" (that is, religion); two, he loved bird watching; and three, he supported the Democratic Party. At the age of 12, he participated in a radio quiz game called "QuizKids". At the age of 15, he entered the University of Chicago as a gifted student, majoring in zoology. After reading the famous popular science book "What is Life?" by the physicist Schrödinger, his interest was switched from migratory birds to genetics. After obtaining a degree from the University of Chicago, he applied for admission to Caltech and Harvard research institutes, but failed. He improved Indiana University and joined the "phage group" of Salvador Luria and others to officially enter the research of genetics. Influenced by this group, Watson began to believe that DNA is the carrier of genes. In 1950, he received his doctorate and went to Copenhagen for postdoctoral research. During this time, he attended an academic conference in Naples. He learned from Maurice Wilkins's speech that DNA has a regular structure, which strengthened his determination to solve the structure of DNA. In 1951, he transferred to the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, met Crick, and used X-ray diffraction data to construct DNA models. Finally, the two proposed the double helix structure of DNA in 1953, and published the results in the journal Nature on April 25 of the same year. Watson went to Harvard University as a teaching assistant in 1956 and was promoted to professor in 1961. In 1962, he was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine with Crick and Wilkins for his research on the structure of DNA. In 1965, he published the epoch-making textbook "Molecular Biology of Genes" (MolecularBiologyoftheGene). In 1968, he published "Double Helix". In the same year, he also served as the head of the Cold Spring Harbor Practice Room (ColdSpringHarborLaboratory) in Long Island, New York, and transferred his research direction to cancer. In 1976, he resigned from Harvard to focus on his position in Cold Spring Harbor. In 1988, he was appointed assistant director of the Human Genome Project by the US National Institutes of Health. A year later, he became the first director of the National Center for Human Genome Research, a position he held until 1992. In 1994, he became the first president of Cold Spring Harbor. Comments: The founding boss of modern molecular biology, academic authority is no longer enough to describe.