James Dewey Watson, KBE, ForMemRS, is an American molecular biologist, geneticist and zoologist, best known as a co-discoverer of the structure of DNA in 1953 with Francis Crick. Watson, Crick, and Maurice Wilkins were awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material". After studies at the University of Chicago and Indiana University, Watson did postdoctoral research to absorb chemistry with the biochemist Herman Kalckar in Copenhagen. Watson next worked at the University of Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory in England, where he first met his future collaborator and friend Francis Crick. From 1956 to 1976, Watson was on the faculty of the Harvard University Biology Department, promoting research in molecular biology. From 1968 he served as director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, New York, greatly expanding its level of funding and research. At CSHL, he shifted his research emphasis to the study of cancer, along with making it a world leading research center in molecular biology. 

April 6th, 1928 in Chicago (Age 96)