Rules for Doing Important Science

James Watson—25 years old when he and his colleague, Francis Crick, discovered the structure of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), the building block of all life on Earth—won the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine in 1962. As Director of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, he has continued to lead the way in genetic research. Dr. Watson served as the first Director of the Human Genome Project at the National Institutes of Health, a massive project to decipher the entire genetic code of the human species. He is now President of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.