James Anthony Borowiec was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1958, the youngest of four children. His father was a union lawyer, interested in local politics, and his mother was a housewife. His extended family, of Polish descent, lived also in the "Polish neighborhood" where they celebrated holidays and family events together. While still a child, Borowiec and his family moved to Atlanta, Georgia, where Borowiec had a Catholic education through high school. Although he says now that science was not well taught, he was interested in science from an early age. Borowiec received his BS in Organic Chemistry from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1980. While there he worked in a chemistry lab during the school year. During one summer he worked for the U. S. Forest Service in Elko, Nevada. He matriculated into the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at UCLA, where he received his PhD in 1986. At UCLA he also met and married Dianne Applegate, a fellow scientist. Borowiec did a rotation in Paul D. Boyer's laboratory, at the Molecular Biology Institute, and then in Jay D. Gralla's laboratory. He worked on DNA supercoiling; lac; and footprinting technique. After receiving his PhD he obtained a post-doc in the Department of Molecular Biology at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. There he worked in Jerard Hurwitz's lab, studying SV40 per se and as a model of human DNA replication. In 1989 he was appointed assistant professor in the Department of Biochemistry at New York University Medical Center in New York City. His work continues there, encompassing over the years an interest in replication of linear DNA; flaws in C. Richard Wobbe's discovery of SSB DNA; T-antigen; ARS; and particularly bovine papillomavirus. Borowiec and his wife, Dianne, who works in her lab at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, and his 2-1/2-year-old son, Zachary, live in Greenwich Village, where they attempt to balance the demands of scientific research and publication with the demands of family life. Borowiec has received several grants, including a post-doc and a grant from the NIH and a Pew Scholars Program grant. He has published many articles on a number of subjects; the articles appear in many different journals, including JMB, Biochemistry, Cell, and PNAS.