What does the 'D' in James D. Watson stand for?

The “D” in James D. Watson stands for Dewey. He was born James Dewey Watson in Chicago on April 6, 1928, and became one of the best-known molecular biologists of the 20th century.

Watson studied biology at the University of Chicago before earning a PhD in zoology at Indiana University in 1950. Soon afterward, he joined Francis Crick at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, where they worked on the structure of DNA. Their double-helix model, published in 1953, helped explain how genetic information could be stored and copied.

A common mix-up is to assume the initial might stand for David, Douglas, or Donald, since those are familiar names beginning with D. In Watson’s full name, however, it is Dewey. Watson, Crick, and Maurice Wilkins shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material.