Scientist of the day - James Dewey Watson

James Dewey Watson is an American molecular biologist, geneticist and zoologist. He is credited for co-discovering the molecular structure of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), a substance that is the basis of heredity. His discovery has been described by other biologists and Nobel laureates as the most important scientific discovery of the 20th century. He was born in Illinois to James D. Watson and Jean Mitchell. Growing up, James Dewey Watson spent hours bird-watching and decided to major in ornithology but Erwin Schrodinger’s book titled ‘What is Life’ had such a profound impact on him that he chose genetics in the end. He received his B.S. degree from the University of Chicago, and his PhD from Indiana University. He was strongly opposed to the belief that genes were proteins that could replicate and DNA was a simple tetranucleotide that supported the genes. James’ perception, influenced by the discoveries and lectures of that time, was that DNA was indeed the genetic molecule. He finally found success with Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins, when the trio discovered the double helix structure of the DNA molecule. For this discovery James Dewey Watson, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins earned the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1962 

Childhood & Early Life

• James Watson was born on April 6, 1928 in Chicago, Illinois. His father, James D. Watson was a businessman and his mother’s name was Jean Mitchell.
• He attended Horace Mann Grammar School for eight years and South Shore High School for two years. For further education he went to the University of Chicago on a tuition scholarship in 1943.
• He graduated from Chicago University with a B. S. degree in Zoology in 1947. He could pursue his dream of studying genetics when Indiana University awarded him a fellowship.
• He did his PhD research at Salvador Luria’s (also his doctoral advisor) laboratory. Luria was one of the leaders of the new Phage group, a movement of geneticists from experiential system to microbial genetics.
• In those times the prevalent notion was that genes were proteins which could replicate and DNA was the structure that supported it. However, Avery-Macleod-McCarty’s experiment led Watson to believe that DNA was indeed the genetic molecule.
• His doctoral thesis was on the effect of hard X-rays on bacteriophage multiplication, inspired from geneticists H. J. Muller and T. M. Sonneborn and microbiologist Max Delbruck. He graduated with a PhD in Zoology in 1950.
• For his post doctoral research he went to Copenhagen University for a year to work with biochemist Herman Kalckar at his laboratory. But as the field of interest differed for both, Watson shifted his workplace after some months.
• His new partner was microbial physiologist Ole Maaloe and they did several experiments to explore the structure of the DNA. After much hard work and deliberation they accepted that the result of their first attempt was inconclusive.

  Major Works

  James Dewey Watson co-discovered the double-helical structure of the DNA molecule in 1953. The discovery is considered to be one of the most important discoveries of the 20th century. In 1962, the trio of James Dewey Watson, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discovery.

  Personal Life & Legacy

  • James Watson married Elizabeth Lewis in 1968 and together they have two sons, Rufus Robert Watson and Duncan James Watson. Rufus, born in 1970, suffers from schizophrenia.
  • His memoir, ‘Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science’, was published in 2007 and a UK Book Tour was scheduled. However, in an interview he made certain statements on race-and-intelligence that were widely considered insensitive. Following the controversy, he cancelled the rest of the tour.
  • The 2007 controversy significantly dented Watson’s image and as a result his financial condition became so bad that he had to auction his Nobel Prize medal in 2014. Russian tycoon, Alisher Usmanov, bought it for US $4.1 million and gave the medal back to Watson.

Birth anniversary of Babu Jagjivan Ram

 

Babu Jagjivan Ram, a Union Minister, freedom fighter and Dalit leader, was born on 5 April 1908 in Chandwa village, present-day Bhojpur district of Bihar to a Dalit family. His father, Shobhi Ram, was in the British army but later resigned, bought farmland in Chandwa, and settled there.

Jagjivan Ram was sent to the village school but soon after, his father died. His mother, Vasanti Devi, however, made sure that his education continued. 

In 1922 when he joined Arrah Town School, he realised that discrimination against Dalits was still rife. He protested against the school’s shocking decision to have separate pitchers of water for so-called ‘untouchable’ students.

Later, a meeting with the renowned nationalist leader Pandit Madan Mohan Malviya, who had come to visit the school, inspired him.

He went on to study at the prestigious Banaras Hindu University (BHU), and later secured a B.Sc. degree from the Calcutta University. Caste discrimination was unfortunately prevalent in those days in BHU as well. In 2007, when Jagjivan Ram’s daughter Meira Kumar, the then Union Minister for social justice and empowerment, was invited to speak about her father’s days at the BHU — during the inauguration of the Babu Jagjivan Ram Chair — she said that he was even denied haircuts by local barbers.

Political rise

Jagjivan Ram’s successful organisation of a workers’ rally in Calcutta brought him to the attention of leaders like Subhas Chandra Bose. In 1934 Jagjivan Ram was involved with relief work in the aftermath of the Bihar earthquake. In 1935 he was nominated to the Bihar Council. He decided to join the Congress.

  

His first wife died in 1933. Two years later, he married Indrani Devi, the daughter of a Kanpur-based social worker.

Jagjivan Ram was jailed during the Quit India Movement in the 1940s. A year before Independence he became a minister in the provisional union cabinet. Subsequently he was labour minister in independent India’s first union cabinet under Jawaharlal Nehru.  

He later held other cabinet posts such as communications and transport & railways in the Nehru regime.

After Indira Gandhi became Prime Minister, he held several important posts in successive cabinets led by her, including minister for labour, employment, and rehabilitation; minister for food and agriculture; and minister of defence. It was during his tenure as agricultural minister that the Green Revolution took place. India defeated Pakistan in the 1971 war when he was the defence minister.

The renowned agriculture scientist M.S. Swaminathan, who worked closely with Jagjivan Ram, wrote in The Hindu in February 2008: “Babuji [Jagjivan Ram] was deeply concerned with issues of social inclusion in access to new technologies….[He] felt that small and marginal farmers might not be able to purchase the new seeds and the fertilisers needed for enabling them to realise the full genetic potential for yield of the new strains. Therefore, he initiated the Small and Marginal Farmers and Landless Labour Programmes in order to provide the needed credit and inputs to those who would have otherwise been bypassed by new technologies.”

Babuji’s legacy

In 1977 shortly after Indira Gandhi announced elections, signalling an end to the emergency, Jagjivan Ram, together with a few other politicians, became part of the Janata coalition by forming the Congress for Democracy.

As the historian Ramachandra Guha writes in India After Gandhi: “[Jagjivan] Ram was a lifelong Congressman, a prominent minister in Nehru’s and Indira Gandhi’s Cabinets and — most crucially — the acknowledged leader of the Scheduled Castes. . . . It was [Jagjivan] Ram who had moved the resolution in the Lok Sabha endorsing the emergency. His resignation came as a shock to the Congress, and as a harbinger of things to come. For Babuji was renowned for his political acumen; that he chose to leave the Congress was widely taken as a sign that this ship was, if not yet sinking, then leaking very badly indeed.”

Between March 1977 and August 1979, Jagjivan Ram was the Deputy Prime Minister in India’s first non-Congress government. But he didn’t get the country’s top job. “There is little doubt that Babuji provided the fatal blow to the Emergency regime. Not surprisingly, he was the frontrunner to the prime minister’s post,” Ajay Bose wrote in the Outlook magazine in May 2010. “But he was thwarted at the last moment by a powerful lobby led by peasant patriarch Charan Singh. . . .” 

By the time Jagjivan Ram died (on 6 July 1986), the political fortunes of another powerful Dalit leader — Kanshi Ram — were on the rise. But Kanshi Ram’s Bahujan Samaj Party sought to, at least in its initial years, distance itself from the legacy of the tallest Dalit leader of the Congress.

As a dedicated Congress member for most of his life and by virtue of the important ministerial posts he held, Babu Jagjivan Ram occupies a unique position in the arc of Dalit political mobilisation that spreads from Ambedkar to Kanshi Ram and Mayawati. But to look at Jagjivan Ram only through a caste lens would be a disservice to his memory and achievements.