Claire O’Connell, contributor

James D. Watson{credit}Courtesy of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory {/credit}

You could say Jim Watson had an ideal postdoc experience. Sixty years ago, when he was still in his 20s, he was a postdoc in the Cavendish Lab at the University of Cambridge when he played a central role in one of the biggest discoveries of the 20th century. Along with Francis Crick, he co-authored the Nature papers in 1953 that proposed the double-helical structure of DNA and outlined a potential mechanism for how that structure could allow DNA to self-replicate. The work earned him a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962 and a place in the history books.

So what advice would Watson give to postdocs today? On a recent trip to Dublin, he took an hour out of a hectic schedule of speaking events to sit with a group of post-docs from Continue reading →