Becoming director at Cold Spring Harbor

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Postdoctoral students at Cold Spring Harbor

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Becoming director at Cold Spring Harbor

James Watson Scientist

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And in 1968, I had become director of the Cold Spring Harbor laboratory, while remaining at Harvard because the Cold Spring Harbor laboratory was about to fail, it had no money. And it was giving the summer courses which the community of molecular biology almost depended on. It was giving one on bacterial viruses, one on genetics of bacteria, and one on animal viruses, and sort of training the scientists that we were needing for the field to progress. And I just liked Cold Spring Harbor. I had been there in summer '48 and so I said I'd be director if I could be most of the time in, at Harvard maintaining my duties, but that I would hire people who would work on tumor viruses. And the first person I hired was Joe Sambrook who had done the experiments in Dulbecco's lab, and he arrived in the summer of 1969.

American molecular biologist James Dewey Watson is probably best known for discovering the structure of DNA for which he was jointly awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine along with Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins. His long career has seen him teaching at Harvard and Caltech, and taking over the directorship of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York. From 1988 to 1992, James Watson was head of the Human Genome Project at the National Institutes of Health. His current research focuses on the study of cancer.

Title: Becoming director at Cold Spring Harbor

Listeners: Walter Gratzer Martin Raff

Walter Gratzer is Emeritus Professor of Biophysical Chemistry at King's College London, and was for most of his research career a member of the scientific staff of the Medical Research Council. He is the author of several books on popular science. He was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard and has known Jim Watson since that time

Martin Raff is a Canadian-born neurologist and research biologist who has made important contributions to immunology and cell development. He has a special interest in apoptosis, the phenomenon of cell death.

Listen to Martin Raff at Web of Stories

Duration: 1 minute, 12 seconds

Date story recorded: November 2008 and October 2009

Date story went live: 18 June 2010