About the Author
James D. Watson was Director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory from 1968 to 1993 and is now its President. He spent his undergraduate years at the University of Chicago and received his Ph.D. in 1950 from Indiana University. Between 1950 and 1953, he did postdoctoral research in Copenhagen and Cambridge, England. While at Cambridge, he began the collaboration that resulted in the elucidation of the double-helical structure of DNA in 1953. (For this discovery, Watson, Francis Crick, and Maurice Wilkins were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1962.) Later in1953, he went to the California Institute of Technology. He moved to Harvard in 1955, where he taught and did research on RNA synthesis and protein synthesis until 1976. He was the first Director of the National Center for Genome Research of the National Institutes of Health from 1989 to 1992. Dr. Watson was sole author of the first, second, and third editions of Molecular Biology of the Gene, and a co-author of the fourth edition. These were published in 1965, 1970, 1976, and 1987 respectively. Watson has also been involved in two other textbooks: he was one of the original authors of Molecular Biology of the Cell and is also an author of Recombinant DNA: a short course.Tania A. Baker is the Whitehead Professor of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She received a B.S. in biochemistry from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Stanford University in 1988. Her graduate research was carried out in the laboratory of Professor Arthur Kornberg and focused on mechanisms of initiation of DNA replication. She did postdoctoral research in the laboratory of Dr. Kiyoshi Mizuuchi at the National Institutes of Health, studying the mechanism and regulation of DNA transposition. Her current research explores mechanisms and regulation of genetic recombination, enzyme-catalyzed protein unfolding, and ATP-dependent protein degradation. Professor Baker received the 2001 Eli Lilly Research Award from the American Society of Microbiology and the 2000 MIT School of Science Teaching Prize for Undergraduate Education. She is co-author (with Arthur Kornberg) of the book DNA Replication, Second Edition.Stephen P. Bell is a Professor of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an Assistant Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He received B.A. degrees from the Department of Biochemistry, Molecular Biology, and Cell Biology and the Integrated Sciences Program at Northwestern University and a Ph.D. in biochemistry at the University of California, Berkeley in 1991. His graduate research was carried out in the laboratory of Robert Tjian and focused on eukaryotic transcription. He did postdoctoral research in the laboratory of Dr. Bruce Stillman at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, working on the initiation of eukaryotic DNA replication. His current research focuses on the mechanisms controlling the duplication of eukaryotic chromosomes. Professor Bell received the 2001 ASBMBÃSchering Plough Scientific Achievement Award, and the Everett Moore Baker Memorial Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching at MIT in 1998. Alexander Gann is Editorial Director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, and a faculty member of the Watson School of Biological Sciences at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. He received his B.Sc in microbiology from University College London and a Ph.D. in molecular biology from The University of Edinburgh in 1989. His graduate research was carried out in the laboratory of Noreen Murray and focused on DNA recognition by restriction enzymes. He did postdoctoral research in the laboratory of Mark Ptashne at Harvard, working on transcriptional regulation, and that of Jerem
