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50 free James Watson trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This James Watson trivia quiz covers the American who co-discovered the structure of DNA at 25 and spent the next seventy years being both celebrated and censured. The easy questions handle the double helix, Crick, the 1962 Nobel Prize, The Double Helix and Cold Spring Harbor. From there it moves through the life: the Chicago boyhood, the radio quiz show, the birdwatching he nearly turned into a career, the Schrodinger book that changed his mind, the Phage Group and the Copenhagen postdoc that led him to Cambridge. The harder end covers who announced the discovery and where, the Oxford visitors who first saw the model, the 1954 admission about Franklin's data, the book's original title and the university press that dropped it, the Human Genome Project row over patents, the genome he put online, the memoir that called colleagues dinosaurs, the medal auction and the buyer who gave it back. Every answer was checked against Watson's encyclopaedia entry before publishing and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Our DNA and famous scientists quizzes are the natural next stop.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01With which two scientists did Watson share the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine?
Crick and Wilkins
The citation was for the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer.
Q 02In which American city was Watson born in 1928?
Chicago
He grew up on the South Side and went to public schools before entering the university at 15.
Q 03As a boy Watson appeared on which popular radio show for bright children?
Quiz Kids
He was already fascinated by birdwatching, a hobby shared with his father.
Q 04Which field did the young Watson originally consider majoring in?
Ornithology
Birdwatching was a hobby he shared with his father.
Q 05Reading which 1944 book in 1946 turned Watson from birds to genetics?
What Is Life?
Schrodinger's little book pointed at a molecule that carried the genetic code.
Q 06At what age did Watson enter university on a tuition scholarship?
15
He credited the liberal admissions policy of university president Robert Hutchins.
Q 07Watson described the luckiest thing that ever happened to him as the fact that his father did what?
Didn't believe in God
He called himself 'an escapee from the Catholic religion' and stopped attending mass at eleven.
Q 08Watson took his PhD in 1950 from a university in which state?
Indiana
He had been drawn to Bloomington by the presence of the Nobel laureate Hermann Muller.
Q 09Who was Watson's doctoral advisor?
Salvador Luria
Luria later shared the 1969 Nobel Prize for the Luria-Delbruck experiment on mutations.
Q 10Watson's PhD research involved using X-rays to inactivate what?
Bacterial viruses
He was part of the Phage Group, which studied the viruses that infect bacteria.
Q 11The 'Phage Group' Watson joined was led by Luria and which other geneticist?
Max Delbruck
Watson first met him in Luria's apartment in 1948 and again that summer at Cold Spring Harbor.
Q 12In 1949 the conventional view Watson was taught held that genes were made of what?
Proteins
DNA was dismissed as a 'stupid tetranucleotide' with a merely structural role.
Q 13Watson spent his 1950-51 postdoctoral year in which European city?
Copenhagen
He never clicked with the biochemist Herman Kalckar and worked instead with Ole Maaloe.
Q 21Franklin's later letters to Watson, found in the Cold Spring Harbor archives, opened with what greeting?
'Dear Jim'
She consulted him on her tobacco mosaic virus RNA work and signed off 'Yours, Rosalind'.
Q 22From 1956 to 1976 Watson was on the biology faculty of which university?
Harvard
His research there focused on RNA and its role in transferring genetic information.
Q 23In the 1960s Watson led 12 biologists demanding US forces withdraw from where?
Vietnam
In 1975 he also joined 2,000 scientists warning President Ford about nuclear proliferation.
Q 14At a meeting in which country did Watson first hear Maurice Wilkins talk about X-ray data on DNA?
Italy
It convinced him that DNA had a definite structure that could be worked out.
Q 15Watson met Francis Crick at which Cambridge laboratory in 1951?
The Cavendish
Luria arranged the postdoc through John Kendrew, whom he had met that summer.
Q 16Who first announced the double helix publicly, at a Solvay conference in Belgium on 8 April 1953?
Lawrence Bragg
The Cavendish director's announcement went unreported by the press.
Q 17Watson and Crick's paper appeared in Nature on which date in 1953?
25 April
It was titled 'Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid'.
Q 18Which future Nobel laureate drove from Oxford with Dorothy Hodgkin in April 1953 to see the DNA model?
Sydney Brenner
The Oxford chemists went in two cars once Hodgkin announced they were off to see the model.
Q 19Rosalind Franklin told Watson and Crick that which part of DNA had to be on the outside of the molecule?
The sugar-phosphate backbones
Their earlier models, like Pauling's, had the chains inside and the bases pointing out.
Q 20In 1954, Watson and Crick admitted their structure without Franklin's data would have been what?
'Most unlikely, if not impossible'
In The Double Helix he later wrote that 'no one at King's realized they were in our hands'.
Q 24Watson's first textbook, published in 1965, was Molecular Biology of the what?
Gene
It pioneered the use of brief declarative subheadings; Molecular Biology of the Cell came later.
Q 25What was Watson's original working title for the book that became The Double Helix?
Honest Jim
The Modern Library later ranked it seventh among the 100 best nonfiction books.
Q 26Which publisher was originally to bring out The Double Helix before Watson's co-laureates objected?
Harvard University Press
The university dropped it and the book was published commercially in 1968.
Q 27Francis Crick described The Double Helix as a 'contemptible pack of' what?
Damned nonsense
He said it to Anne Sayre for her book Rosalind Franklin and DNA.
Q 28At Cold Spring Harbor Watson shifted the laboratory's research emphasis to the study of what?
Cancer
Its scientists went on to make major contributions to the genetic basis of the disease.
Q 29Watson resigned from Cold Spring Harbor in 2007 after linking race genetically to what?
Intelligence
In 2019, after he repeated the views in a documentary, the laboratory revoked his honorary titles.
Q 30From 1990 to 1992 Watson headed which effort at the National Institutes of Health?
The Human Genome Project
It finished mapping the human genome in 2003, under his successor Francis Collins.