James Dewey Watson, who helped uncover the structure of DNA's double helix, launched the Human Genome Project and became famous for his racist, sexist and other offensive remarks, has died. He was 97.
His death was confirmed by The New York Times by his son Duncan, who said Watson died Thursday at a hospice in East Northport, N.Y., on Long Island. He had previously been hospitalized with an infection. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory also confirmed his death.
Watson was born in Chicago in 1928 and achieved scientific fame in 1953, when he was 25, for solving the molecular structure of DNA—the genetic blueprint of life—along with his colleague Francis Crick at England's Cavendish Laboratory. Their discovery relied heavily on the work of chemist and crystallographer Rosalind Franklin of King's College London, whose X-ray images of DNA provided important clues to the structure of the molecule, which resembles a twisted ladder. One image in particular from Franklin's laboratory, Photo 51, made Watson and Crick's discovery possible. But her contribution was not fully appreciated. The image was given to Watson and Crick without Franklin's knowledge or consent by Maurice Wilkins, a biophysicist and colleague of Franklin's.
Watson, Crick and Wilkins were awarded Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962 for his discovery of the structure of DNA. Franklin had already died by then (she died in 1958 at the age of 37 from ovarian cancer), and Nobel Prizes are not awarded posthumously. But Watson and Crick's attitude towards Franklin and her research caused lasting contempt in the scientific community. Throughout his career and in his memoirs, Watson disparaged Franklin's intelligence and appearance.
