James Watson, in opening his Paul D. Gottleib lecture, told the
audience he should have seen Austin much sooner. The 79-year-old
Nobel Laureate said he had learned he might get a job in Austin
in the early 1950s. Instead, he went to Cambridge, England where
he partnered with Francis Crick to discover the double helix
structure of DNA. Watson might not have been in Austin before he
gave his Sept. 11 speech, but there was just one degree of
separation between him and The University of Texas at Austin. He
received his Ph.D. at Indiana University, where one of his
mentors was Hermann J. Muller, who had won a Nobel Prize for
work he did at The University of Texas in 1927. Speaking in the
Texas Union Ballroom, Watson drew a large crowd of faculty and
students. The lecture series is named in honor of the late Dr.
Paul D. Gottlieb, an outstanding professor of molecular genetics
and microbiology and director of the School of Biological
Sciences, who died in 2003. Watson’s talk drew from his new
book, “Avoid Boring Peo