James D. Watson was Director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, New York, from 1968 to 1993 and is now its President. He was the first Director of the National Center for Humane Genome Research of the National Institutes of Health from 1989 to 1992. With Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins, he received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962. He is the author of the best-selling memoir The Double Helix and the groundbreaking textbook The Molecular Biology of the Gene, and is co-author of Molecular Biology of the Cell and Recombinant DNA: A Short Course.
Among many other awards and honors, Dr Watson is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society, and a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the National Medal of Science.