Jon Beckwith is American Cancer Society Professor at Harvard Medical School, where he leads a research group in genetics that in 1969 achieved the first isolation of a gene from a bacterial chromosome. In the late 1950s, he was a graduate student at Harvard University in Biochemical Sciences, the program in which James Watson was a professor. Beckwith is a coeditor of The Double-Edged Helix: Social Implications of Genetics in a Diverse Society (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002) and the author of a memoir, Making Genes, Making Waves: A Social Activist in Science (Harvard University Press, 2002), which was reviewed in the January–February issue.