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Nobel laureate James D. Watson to receive top honor from
Illinois Institute of Technology
CHICAGO, March 24, 1999—James D. Watson, a 1962 Nobel
laureate in medicine and president of Cold Spring Harbor
Laboratory, will receive the Henry Townley Heald Award from
Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), the university announced
today. The Heald Award, named for IIT’s first president, is the
university’s highest honor.
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The award will be presented to Watson at the Henry Townley
Heald Award Dinner on April 15, at the Hyatt Regency
McCormick Place, Chicago. The private event begins with a
cocktail reception at 6 p.m., followed by dinner and the award
ceremony at 7 p.m.
Besides serving as a platform for the presentation of the award,
the black-tie dinner also recognizes the university’s supporters,
and many of Chicago’s top business and philanthropic leaders are
expected to attend the event.
Also on April 15, Watson will be on IIT’s Main Campus to deliver
a
free public lecture at 4 p.m. His talk, titled “From the Double
Helix to the Human Genome Project,” will be held in the
Hermann Union Building, 3241 S. Federal St., Chicago. A
reception will follow. The lecture is sponsored by IIT’s Institute
for Science, Law and Technology, and co-sponsored by Chicago
Area Sigma Xi. For further information, call (312) 567-3104.
Watson will be honored with the Heald Award for invaluable
contributions to science and humanity over the course of his
productive and path-breaking career. Watson is best known for
his 1953 discovery of the structure of DNA (deoxyribonucleic
acid), for which he received, with Francis Crick and Maurice
Wilkins, the 1962 Nobel Prize in Medicine. They proposed that
the DNA molecule takes the shape of a double helix, an
elegantly simple structure that resembles a gently twisted ladder.
After a teaching career at Harvard (1955-1976), Watson became
director of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island,
New York. He was a driving force behind establishing the
Human Genome Project, a worldwide effort to map and
sequence the genes of a complete set of chromosomes, and
became the project’s first director in 1989. After the project was
well under way, he resigned his position as director in 1992.
Watson is now president of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.
In addition to the Nobel Prize, Watson has received numerous
honors, including the Medal of Freedom from President Ford
(1977), the Copley Medal from the Royal Society (1993), the
National Medal of Science (1997) and the Mendel Medal
(1998).
Watson joins a prestigious roster of past Heald Award honorees,
including Jonas Salk, Ross Perot, Ted Turner, Buckminster Fuller,
Edward Teller, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Donald Rumsfeld,
Kazuo Inamori, Robert Galvin and Daniel Goldin.
Illinois Institute of Technology is a private, Ph.D.-granting
university with programs in engineering, science, psychology,
architecture, business, design and law. One of the 16 institutions
of the Association of Independent Technological Universities
(AITU), IIT offers exceptional preparation for professions that
require technological sophistication. Through a committed
faculty and close personal attention, IIT provides a challenging
academic program focused by the rigor of the real world.
