Watson was educated at the University of Chicago and the University of Indiana. In the early 1950s he became interested in molecular biology, and from 1953 he worked on the structure of DNA with Francis Crick when they were both at the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge. Crick, Watson, and Maurice Wilkins shared the 1962 Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine for this work. Watson later wrote a number of textbooks on molecular biology and several popular books about DNA.