Look Who it Was Random video

James Watson - Aiming for a bestseller (46/99)

135 views · Published 5 October 2017 · 2:58 · Indexed 20 September 2026

Channel: Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People · 2017 · Science & Technology

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To listen to more of James Watson’s stories, go to the playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVV0r6CmEsFzPKkZc0DuOF1Cuj721qJsV

James Watson (1928-2025) was an American molecular biologist and geneticist most known for co-winning the 1962 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for discovering the structure of DNA and its significance in transferring information in living systems. Between 1988 and 1992, he was associated with the National Institutes of Health, helping to establish the Human Genome Project. [Listeners: Martin Raff and Walter Gratzer]
 
TRANSCRIPT: I think I set out to write a textbook which could be read for a long, you know, that wouldn’t go out of date in three years, to try and put it in a broader reference frame. But, you know, everything was dominated John Kennedy in those, you know, several years. There’s features, the glamour of his wife, the and suddenly style was back, and I think I wanted to be part of that era and, you know, I wanted to be, you know, a writer like Galbraith or someone, you know, who was trying to do slightly more than the typical academic by putting it in a bigger picture, and sort of realizing, yeah, no-one had written the story and the, you know, there was a big opportunity to, you couldn’t just start with DNA, you had to put DNA in the context of everything. And then I wanted to end on cancer because I wanted to end sort of where you might be going in the future, so when you finished the book, it made you want to be a biologist. That was certainly my aim, but, you know, I didn’t go out and the one thing I was conscious before I started is I wanted to write a best seller because I was conscious that Paul Samuelson had a big house in Belmont from his textbook, so the, I was aware that textbooks made money. And so I never had a big seller but even the “The Molecular Biology of the Gene”, which came out costing $6, it doubled my salary as a Harvard professor which was very important because I would never have been tempted to leave Harvard for money, but, you know, if I’d suddenly married and had that salary of a Harvard professor, that’d be depressing, you know, because I had you know, some of my friends had nice houses, and by the time I was writing I’d begun to collect paintings so the books were a device to continue to be an art collector.

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