Which 1944 book helped shift Watson's interest toward genetics?

The 1944 book that helped shift James Watson’s interest toward genetics was Erwin Schrödinger’s *What Is Life?*.

Subtitled *The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell*, the book asked how living organisms preserve and transmit hereditary information. Schrödinger argued that the hereditary material might be an “aperiodic crystal”—a molecule whose structure could encode a biological message. That idea helped attract physicists and mathematically minded researchers to biology.

Watson read the book as a young man and moved away from his earlier interest in ornithology and bird study. Its discussion of genes encouraged him to pursue genetics at Indiana University, where he studied under Hermann Muller. Watson later joined Francis Crick at Cambridge, and their 1953 DNA model helped launch modern molecular biology.

A common mix-up is to credit *The Selfish Gene*, published by Richard Dawkins in 1976. That later book popularized an influential evolutionary perspective, but it did not inspire Watson’s original turn toward genetics.