The DNA Helix - a strand that provides all information of our genetic make-up. Understanding the codes and the structure oif this strand is really a tough job, but that's where Dr. James Dewey Watson excelled at.

James Dewey Watson is one of the foremost scientists who pioneered in the field of genetics. He was born on April 6, 1928 at Chicago, Illinois. By 1947, he had grown a passion for the classics and bird watching which might be the reason for Harvard not accepting him for graduate studies. He then studied at Indiana where he got his Ph.D. in genetics.

By the 1950's, Watson joined the Cavendish laboratories at the time when the other scientists (Crick, Wilkins, Pauling and Franklin) were racing to find the structure of the DNA strand. The X-ray crystallography experiments of Franklin and Wilkins provided that the DNA is a molecule with two strands that forms a tightly linked pair. Watson and Crick by 1953 then proposed that the structure of the DNA was a winding helix (a structure resembling that of a twisted ladder) in which pairs of bases (guanine pairs with cytosine and adenine pairs with thymine) join the two strands together. Their research gave the grounds for further study of the DNA strand, namely, it allowed the scientists to explain how the DNA replication works where the strand "unzips" and break off, the parts serving as templates for the creation of new DNA strands.

His research on the structure of the DNA strand gave him and his colleauges (Crick and Franklin) the Nobel Prize on molecular biology in 1962. By 1968, he became the director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, a financially unstable but renowned institution. He also made considerable contributions in understanding the genetic code and controlling protein synthesis fascilitated by DNA templates.

Due to the fame and prestige he brought to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, he was appointed in 1988 as head of the Human Genome Project, the most controversial and highly funded project in the history of genetics and also one of the greatest potential payoff in the field of Medicine. He earned the title of "Infant Terrible" of molecular biology due to the lack of consideration at social, ethical and political implications of the Human Genome Project.