James Watson entered the University of Chicago at age 15.
Watson was born in Chicago in 1928 and showed exceptional academic ability from an early age. The university's liberal admissions policy under president Robert Hutchins allowed him to enroll as a teenager, and he received a tuition scholarship at 15.
He initially studied zoology and was strongly interested in birds, even considering ornithology as a career. In 1946, reading Erwin Schrödinger's What Is Life? shifted his attention toward genetics and the physical basis of heredity. He earned his bachelor's degree from Chicago in 1947.
Watson later pursued graduate research at Indiana University, where he studied bacteriophages under Salvador Luria. He eventually met Francis Crick at Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory, where their collaboration led to the 1953 double-helix model. A common mix-up is to confuse Watson's early university enrollment at 15 with his later doctoral education, which took place elsewhere.