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James D. Watson, the brilliant but controversial American biologist who discovered the structure of the genetic molecule DNA in 1953, ushering in the age of genetics and providing the basis for the biotechnology revolution of the second half of the 20th century, has died at the age of 97.
His death was confirmed by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, where he worked for many years. The New York Times reported that Watson died this week at a hospice on Long Island.
In his later years, Watson’s reputation was tarnished by his comments about genetics and race, and he was ostracized from the scientific community.
From a young age, he was known as much for his writing as for his science and for his infantile, fearsome personality, which included a willingness to exploit the data of other scientists to advance his own career.
His 1968 memoir, The Double Helix, was a racy, take-no-prisoners account of how he and British physicist Francis Crick first determined the three-dimensional shape of DNA. This work earned them a share of the 1962 Nobel Prize in Medicine and ultimately led to genetic engineering, gene therapy, and other DNA-based medicines and technologies.
Click complained that the book “grossly invaded my privacy.” Another colleague, Maurice Wilkins, objected to what he called “a distorted and unfavorable image of scientists” as ambitious schemers willing to deceive colleagues and competitors in order to make discoveries.
Additionally, Watson and Crick, who conducted their research at the University of Cambridge in England, were widely criticized for using raw data collected by X-ray crystallographer Rosalind Franklin to construct their DNA model (Two Intertwined Staircases) without fully acknowledging her contributions. As Watson put it in The Double Helix, scientific research feels the “conflicting forces of ambition and a sense of fair play.”
In 2007, Mr Watson again sparked widespread outrage when he told the Times of London that he believed tests had shown that Africans’ intelligence was “not really… the same as ours”.
He was accused of promoting long-discredited theories of racism and was forced to resign from his position as director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York shortly thereafter. Although he later apologized, he made similar comments in a 2019 documentary, calling differences in performance between races on IQ tests, which most scientists attribute to environmental factors, “genetic.”
“Tough Irishman”
James Dewey Watson was born in Chicago on April 6, 1928, and graduated from the University of Chicago in 1947 with a degree in zoology. He studied genetics at Indiana University and received his Ph.D. In 1951, he joined the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, where he met Crick and began exploring the structural chemistry of DNA.
Using what was known about biology at the time and X-ray images, they determined that DNA was structured as a twisted, double-helix ladder, with each rung made up of a pair of chemicals. Understanding its structure now explains what used to be a great mystery: how DNA passes its genetic blueprint to the next generation of cells and organisms. This explanation has allowed researchers to track evolution and human history, among other things, and better understand and treat a vast number of diseases.
Watson and Crick went their separate ways after their DNA research. Although Watson was only 25 years old and had not made any new scientific discoveries that approached the importance of the double helix, he remained an authority in the scientific community.
“After achieving what he accomplished at such a young age, he had to think about what he was going to do with his life,” biologist Marc Ptashne, who met Watson in the 1960s and remained friends, told Reuters in a 2012 interview. “He figured out how to play to his strengths.”
Its strength was to play what Ptashne calls a “tough Irishman” and become one of the leaders in pushing the United States to the forefront of molecular biology. Watson joined Harvard University’s biology department in 1956.
“The existing biology department felt that molecular biology was just a flash in the pan,” said Guido Guidotti, a biochemist at Harvard University. But when Watson arrived, Guidotti said he immediately told everyone in the biology department, all the scientists whose research focuses on whole organisms and populations rather than cells and molecules, that they were wasting their time and should retire.
This earned Watson decades of hostility from some traditional biologists, but he also attracted young scientists and graduate students who were to start a revolution in genetics.
In 1968, Watson went to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island to build a facility and spent eight years between the lab and Harvard University. At the time, the lab was “just a remote area infested with mosquitoes,” Ptashne said. As director, “Jim transformed it into a vibrant, world-class institution.”
genome project
In 1990, Watson was named leader of the Human Genome Project. The goal was to determine the order of the 3 billion chemical units that make up the complete human DNA. When the National Institutes of Health, which had funded the project, decided to apply for a patent on some of the DNA sequences, Watson attacked the NIH director and resigned, arguing that genomic knowledge should remain in the public domain.
In 2007, he became the second person in the world to have his entire genome sequenced. He released the sequences and argued that concerns about “genetic privacy” were overdone, but he made an exception because he didn’t want to know whether he carried a gene linked to an increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease. Watson did indeed have a gene associated with novelty seeking.
Watson told a Discover magazine interviewer in 2003 that his proudest accomplishment was not the discovery of the double helix, which he wrote, but which he thought would be discovered in the next year or two anyway.
“My heroes were never scientists,” he said. “They were Graham Greene and Christopher Isherwood. You know, great writers.”
Friends say Watson cherished the bad boy image he presented to the world in “The Double Helix,” and emphasized it in his 2007 book “Avoiding Boring People.”
Married with two sons, he often belittled women in public and bragged about chasing what he called “poppies.” However, he personally encouraged many women scientists, including biologist Nancy Hopkins of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“I don’t think I would have had a career in science without his support,” said Hopkins, who has long been outspoken about anti-women bias in science. “Jim has been so supportive of me and the other women. It’s a strange thing to understand.”
