James Dewey Watson, whose co-discovery of the twisted ladder structure of DNA in 1953 helped light the fuse for revolutions in medicine, crime fighting, genealogy and ethics, has died, according to his former research laboratory. He was 97.
The breakthrough, made when the brash Chicago native Watson was just 24 years old, turned him into a revered figure in the world of science for decades. But near the end of his life, he faced condemnation and professional censure for making offensive remarks, including that black people were less intelligent than white people.
Watson shared the 1962 Nobel Prize with Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins for the discovery that deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, is a double helix, consisting of two strands that twist around each other to form something that resembles a long, gently winding staircase.
This realization was a breakthrough. This immediately suggested how hereditary information is stored and how cells duplicate their DNA when dividing. Duplication begins when two strands of DNA break like lightning.
Even among non-scientists, the double helix has become an instantly recognizable symbol of science, appearing in such places as the work of Salvador Dali and British postage stamps.
This discovery helped open the door to later developments such as altering the genetic structure of living things, treating diseases by introducing genes into patients, identifying human remains and criminal suspects from DNA samples, and tracing family trees. But it also raised a host of ethical questions, such as whether body structure should be altered for cosmetic reasons or in a way that would be passed on to a person's offspring.
“Francis Crick and I made the discovery of the century, and it was quite obvious,” Watson once said. He later wrote: “We could never have foreseen the explosive impact of the double helix on science and society.”
Watson had never made another laboratory discovery of this magnitude. But in the decades that followed, he wrote influential textbooks and best-selling memoirs, and helped lead a project to map the human genome. He selected talented young scientists and helped them. And he used his prestige and contacts to influence science policy.
Watson died in hospice care after a short illness, his son said Friday. His former research laboratory confirmed that he had died the previous day.
“He never stopped fighting for people suffering from illness,” Duncan Watson said of his father.
Watson's initial motivation for supporting the gene project was personal: his son Rufus had been hospitalized with a possible diagnosis of schizophrenia, and Watson believed that knowing the full makeup of DNA would be critical to understanding the disease—perhaps in time to help his son.
He attracted unwanted attention in 2007 when London's Sunday Times Magazine quoted him as saying he was “inherently gloomy about Africa's prospects” because “our entire social policy is based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours, even though all the tests say that is not entirely true.” He said that while he hopes everyone is equal, “people who have to deal with black employees find that that's not true.”
He apologized, but after an international furor he was removed from his position as director of the prestigious Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York. A week later he retired. He worked there in various management positions for almost 40 years.
In a television documentary aired in early 2019, Watson was asked whether his views had changed. “No, not at all,” he said. In response, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory stripped Watson of several honorary titles, saying his claims were “reprehensible” and “not supported by science.”
He demonstrated “a regrettable propensity for inflammatory and offensive language, particularly late in his career,” Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, said in 2019. “His outbursts, especially when it came to issues of race, were both deeply misguided and deeply hurtful. I just wish Jim's views on society and humanity were consistent with his brilliant scientific discoveries.”
In the fall of 1951, tall, thin Watson—already a doctorate at age 23—arrived at Britain's Cambridge University, where he met Crick. As Watson's biographer later said: “It was intellectual love at first sight.”
Together they sought to understand the structure of DNA, aided by X-ray studies by colleague Rosalind Franklin and her graduate student Raymond Gosling. Watson was later criticized for her dismissive portrayal of Franklin in The Double Helix, and today she is considered a prime example of a female scientist whose contributions went unnoticed. She died in 1958.
Watson and Crick built models similar to Tinker toys to figure out the structure of the molecule. One Saturday morning in 1953, while playing with pieces of cardboard that he had carefully cut out to represent fragments of a DNA molecule, Watson suddenly realized how these pieces could form the “rungs” of a double helix ladder.
His first reaction: “This is so beautiful.”
After the discovery, Watson spent two years at Caltech before joining the faculty at Harvard in 1955. Before leaving Harvard in 1976, he essentially created the university's molecular biology program, scientist Mark Ptashne recalled in a 1999 interview.
Watson became director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 1968, its president in 1994, and chancellor 10 years later. He transformed the Long Island laboratory into an educational center for scientists and non-scientists, focused research on cancer, instilled a sense of excitement, and raised vast sums of money.
Watson was born in Chicago on April 6, 1928, into “a family that believed in books, birds and the Democratic Party,” as he put it. From his ornithologist father he inherited an interest in ornithology and an aversion to explanations not based on reason or science.
He became interested in genetics at age 17 when he read a book that said genes are the essence of life.
At the time, it was not clear whether genes were made of DNA, at least for any form of life other than bacteria. But Watson went to Europe to study the biochemistry of nucleic acids such as DNA. At a conference in Italy, Watson saw an X-ray image that showed DNA could form crystals.
“Suddenly I became interested in chemistry,” Watson wrote in The Double Helix. If genes could crystallize, “they would have to have a regular structure that could be solved in a simple way.
“The potential key to the secret of life was impossible to get out of my mind,” he recalled.
His remarks about race in 2007 were not the first time Watson's comments struck a nerve. In a speech in 2000, he suggested that sex drive is related to skin color. And he previously told the newspaper that if a gene that controls sexuality is found and can be detected in the womb, a woman who does not want to have a gay child should be allowed to have an abortion.
Both of Watson's Nobel laureates, Crick and Wilkins, died in 2004.
