She was passed away at the age of 97 by James D. Watson, the brilliant but controversial American who, together with the physicist Francis Crick, succeeded in discovering the structure of his double helix in 1953, thus ushering in the era of genetics and laying the foundations for its revolution at the end of the 20th century.
His death was confirmed by the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, where he worked for many years. The New York Times reported that Watson died this week in a Long Island nursing home.
He was known for his controversial public comments
In his later years, his reputation was tarnished by racist comments about genetics and race, which led to his exclusion from the scientific community.
Watson was known as much for the way he wrote as for the “bad boy” persona he embodied. He was also known for his “habit” of using other scientists’ data to advance his own career and research.
His memoir, The Double Helix, is a bold account of how he and British physicist Francis Crick first determined the three-dimensional shape of DNA. The achievement earned the duo the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1962 and eventually led to genetic engineering, gene therapy, and other DNA-based technologies and treatments.
Crick had argued that the book “brutally invaded his privacy”, while another colleague, Maurice Wilkins, argued that the book presented “a distorted and negative image of scientists” as ambitious conspirators willing to deceive colleagues and competitors in order to make a discovery.
It is noted that Watson and Crick, who conducted their research at the University of Cambridge, were heavily criticized for using primary data collected by crystallographer Rosalind Franklin to build their model of DNA – two interconnected scales – without fully acknowledging her contribution. As he wrote in The Double Helix, scientific research touches upon “the contradictory pulls of ambition and a sense of fair play.”
Similarly, in 2007 his statements to the Times of London that he believed the measurements showed that the intelligence of Africans “is not really… the same as ours” caused outrage.
These statements caused an uproar, as his critics pointed out that this is an old and debunked racist theory. The result was that he was forced to resign as dean of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL). Although he later apologized, he made similar comments again in a 2019 documentary, attributing differences in IQ performance between races – which most scientists attribute to environmental factors – to “genetic” reasons.
The discovery of the double helix and his career
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 received his PhD from Indiana University, focusing on genetics. In 1951 he joined the team at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, where he met Crick and began the search for the chemical structure of DNA.
The double helix opened the doors to the genetics revolution. In the structure proposed by Crick and Watson, the “rungs” of the helical ladder consisted of chemical base pairs, known as nucleotides. As they noted at the end of their 1953 publication: “It has not escaped our notice that the special pairing we propose immediately points to a possible mechanism for copying the genetic material.”
This phrase meant that the helix structure “provided” the mechanism by which genetic information can be accurately copied from generation to generation. This understanding led to the discovery of gene engineering and many other DNA-based techniques.
After the DNA research, Watson and Crick went their separate ways. In 1956 he began working in the Biology Department at Harvard, while in 1968, Watson also began working at CSHL on Long Island, thus holding two positions that allowed him to be at the forefront of scientific research for eight years.
In 1990, Watson took over as head of the Human Genome Project, which aimed to sequence the 3 billion chemical units that make up human DNA. When the National Institutes of Health (NIH) decided to patent certain DNA sequences, Watson clashed with the NIH director and resigned, arguing that knowledge of the genome should remain public.
In 2007 he became the second person in the world to have his complete genome sequenced. He made his data public, saying concerns about “genetic privacy” were overblown, though he asked not to know whether he carried a gene that increases his risk for Alzheimer’s. He did, however, have a gene associated with the search for novelty.
He was married with two sons, often made sexist comments and bragged about his love “adventures”, but at the same time there are many records that he supported several female scientists.
