James Watson
Early life and education

Watson was born in Chicago on April 6, 1928, as the only son of Jean (née Mitchell) and James D. Watson, a businessman descended mostly from colonial English immigrants to America. His mother's father, Lauchlin Mitchell, a tailor, was from Glasgow, Scotland, and her mother, Lizzie Gleason, was the child of parents from County Tipperary, Ireland. His mother was a modestly religious Catholic and his father an Episcopalian who had lost his belief in God. Watson was raised Catholic, but he later described himself as "an escapee from the Catholic religion". Watson said, "The luckiest thing that ever happened to me was that my father didn't believe in God." By age 11, Watson stopped attending mass and embraced the "pursuit of scientific and humanistic knowledge."

Watson grew up on the South Side of Chicago and attended public schools, including Horace Mann Elementary School and South Shore High School. He was fascinated with bird watching, a hobby shared with his father, so he considered majoring in ornithology. Watson appeared on Quiz Kids, a popular radio show that challenged bright youngsters to answer questions. Thanks to the liberal policy of university president Robert Hutchins, he enrolled at the University of Chicago, where he was awarded a tuition scholarship, at the age of 15. Among his professors was Louis Leon Thurstone from whom Watson learned about factor analysis, which he would later reference on his controversial views on race.

After reading Erwin Schrödinger 's book, What Is Life? in 1946, Watson changed his professional ambitions from the study of ornithology to genetics. Watson earned his BS degree in zoology from the University of Chicago in 1947. In his autobiography, Avoid Boring People, Watson described the University of Chicago as an "idyllic academic institution where he was instilled with the capacity for critical thought and an ethical compulsion not to suffer fools who impeded his search for truth", in contrast to his description of later experiences. In 1947 Watson left the University of Chicago to become a graduate student at Indiana University, attracted by the presence at Bloomington of the 1946 Nobel Prize winner Hermann Joseph Muller, who in crucial papers published in 1922, 1929, and in the 1930s had laid out all the basic properties of the heredity molecule that Schrödinger presented in his 1944 book. He received his PhD degree from Indiana University in 1950; Salvador Luria was his doctoral advisor.
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