James Watson may be one of the most famous, influential, and controversial people of modern biology. James  Watson is an American molecular biologist, geneticist and zoologist, best known as one of the co-discoverers of the structure of DNA in 1953. James Watson was born in 1928 in Chicago, Illinois to James Watson, Sr. and Jean Mitchell. In 1947, he received a Bachelor of Science degree in zoology and then went on to attend Indiana University in Bloomington, where he received his Ph.D. in zoology in 1950. His Ph.D. thesis was a study of the effect of hard X-rays on bacteriophage multiplication, and he became interested in the work of scientists working at the University of Cambridge with photographic patterns made by X-rays. He received the National Medal Of Science in 1997.