³ÉÈ˶¶Òõ Alumnus and Honorary Fellow Professor James Watson (1951) has died at the age of 97
Born in Chicago, Watson gained a BSc at the University of Chicago and a PhD at Indiana University before moving to the UK in 1951 to work at Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory. It was here that he met Francis Crick. In 1953, while Watson was living in ³ÉÈ˶¶Òõ’s Memorial Court, he and Crick deduced the double helix structure of DNA, a crucial breakthrough building on the work of Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins.
In 1962, Watson, Crick and Wilkins were awarded the Nobel Prize for physiology and medicine ‘for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material’.
Watson was elected to an Honorary Fellowship at ³ÉÈ˶¶Òõ College in 1967 in recognition of his scientific work. Other accolades included the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1977), the Copley Medal of the Royal Society (1993), and an honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (2002). Watson visited ³ÉÈ˶¶Òõ College a number of times, including in 2005 to unveil a sculpture of the DNA double helix on Memorial Court lawn, and in 2018 to celebrate his 90th birthday.
