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Maxine Frank Singer (1931- ) assisted Marshall Nirenberg in his coding research and went on to run her own laboratory at NIH and serve as president of the Carnegie Institute in Washington, D.C. Singer graduated from Swarthmore College and earned her Ph.D. in biochemistry from Yale University in 1957. After two years as a postdoctoral fellow in Leon Heppel's laboratory at the National Institute of Arthritis and Metabolic Diseases. Singer took a permanent position at NIH. She joined the Laboratory of Biochemistry in 1975 and served as chief of that laboratory from 1979 until 1988, when she became president of the Carnegie Foundation, a group that funds fundamental science research. During her term at the Carnegie Foundation, she continued to act as scientist emerita at NIH, until her laboratory finally closed in 1997.
Stetten, DeWitt, Jr.
DeWitt “Hans” Stetten Jr. (1912-1990) was the medical director of intramural research at the National Institute of Arthritis and Metabolic Diseases in the 1950s when Marshall Nirenberg did his coding research. Stetten earned his undergraduate degree at Harvard in 1930, his M.D. at Columbia University in 1934, and his Ph.D. at Columbia in 1940. After a decade of teaching and research at both of those institutions, he moved on to the Public Health Research Institute in New York City in 1948 and to NIH in 1954. Stetten left NIH to become dean of the Medical School at Rutgers University in 1965 but returned in 1974 to become NIH Deputy Director for Science. He acted as a consultant to NIH from 1970 until his death in 1990. One of Stetten's legacies to NIH was the organization of the museum of medical research that now bears his name.
Watson, James
James Watson (1928- ) shared the Nobel Prize with Francis Crick in 1962 for their identification of the double helix as the shape of DNA. Watson earned his B.A. at the University of Chicago and went on to complete a Ph.D. at Indiana University in 1950. Watson met Crick when they both worked at the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University in England. Both interested in the structure of DNA, they built the first successful model of the nucleic acid in 1953. Watson's best-selling book The Double Helix, published in 1968, recounted the years of DNA research. In 1956 Watson moved on to the biology department at Harvard, where he studied RNA. He became director of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 1968, where he has been ever since. He has helped to make Cold Spring Harbor a center for molecular genetics and cancer research, among other topics. Watson ran the Human Genome Project at NIH from 1988 to 1992.
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