Topic summary
James D. Watson
Extracted from the Wikipedia article James Watson.
Early life and education
James Dewey Watson was born in Chicago on April 6, 1928, the only son of Jean (née Mitchell) and James D. Watson, a businessman descended mostly from colonial English immigrants to America. His maternal grandfather, Lauchlin Mitchell, a tailor, was from Glasgow, Scotland, and his maternal grandmother, Lizzie Gleason, was the child of parents from County Tipperary, Ireland. Watson's mother was a modestly religious Catholic and his father an Episcopalian who had lost his belief in God. Watson grew up Catholic, but he later described himself as "an escapee from the Catholic religion". Watson said, "The luckiest thing that ever happened to me was that my father didn't believe in God." By age 11, Watson stopped attending mass and embraced the "pursuit of scientific and humanistic knowledge."