James Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, is dead at 97

James D Watson, who entered the pantheon of science at age 25 when he joined in the discovery of the structure of DNA, one of the most momentous breakthroughs in the history of science, died on Thursday in East Northport, New York, on Long Island. He was 97.

His death, in a hospice, was confirmed on Friday by his son Duncan, who said Dr Watson was transferred to the hospice from a hospital this week after being treated there for an infection.

Watson’s role in decoding DNA, the genetic blueprint for life, would have been enough to establish him as one of the most important scientists of the 20th century. But he cemented that fame by leading the ambitious Human Genome Project and writing perhaps the most celebrated memoir in science.

For decades a famous and famously cantankerous American man of science, Watson lived on the grounds of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, which, in another considerable accomplishment, he took over as director in 1968 and transformed from a relatively small establishment on Long Island with a troubled past into one of the world’s major centers of microbiology. He stepped down in 1993 and took a largely honorary position of chancellor.

But his official career there ended ignominiously in 2007 after he ignited an uproar by suggesting, in an interview with The Sunday Times in London, that Black people, overall, were not as intelligent as white people. He repeated the assertion in on-camera interviews for a PBS documentary about him, part of the American Masters series. When the program aired in 2018, the lab, in response, revoked honorary titles that Watson had retained.

They were far from the first incendiary, off-the-cuff comments by a man who was once described as “the Caligula of biology,” and he repudiated them immediately. Nevertheless, though he continued his biological theorizing on subjects like the roles of oxidants and antioxidants in cancer and diabetes, Watson ceased to command the scientific spotlight.

He said later that he felt that his fellow scientists had abandoned him.

Watson’s tell-all memoir, The Double Helix, had also provoked his colleagues when it was published in 1968, infuriating them for, in their view, elevating himself while shortchanging others who were involved in the project. Still, it was instantly hailed as a classic of the literature of science.

But it was in discerning the double-helix physical structure of deoxyribonucleic acid, the chromosome-building molecule and medium of genetic inheritance, that won Watson and his co-discoverer, Francis H C Crick, enduring fame and the Nobel Prize in medicine or physiology in 1962.

In 1953, when Watson and Crick made their discovery, relatively little was known about DNA’s structure and action.

“It changed biology forever,” Bruce Stillman, who in 1994 took over from Watson as director of the Cold Spring Harbor lab, said in an interview for this obituary in 2018.

For Stillman, the discovery of DNA’s structure ranks with Darwin’s theory of evolution and Mendel’s laws of genetic inheritance. “The structure of DNA told us how inheritance occurs,” Stillman said, “but it also explained mutation and hence evolution.”

Watson came to fame in 1953, when biologists were concluding that DNA was at the center of genetic inheritance but could not say for sure what it looked like, how its information was stored, how that information was passed from generation to generation, or how it might control the actions of genes in cells.

In 1869, a Swiss biologist, Friedrich Miescher, had isolated a substance containing the DNA molecule — deoxyribonucleic acid — while studying the nucleus of white blood cells. He called the substance “nuclein” and theorized that it might have something to do with heredity.

Watson had in 1951 abandoned biochemistry work in Copenhagen, Denmark, and moved to the Cavendish Laboratory, part of the University of Cambridge in England; he said he was determined to work with researchers there who shared his fascination with DNA, which he considered the most important subject in biology.

There he encountered Crick, who, in his 30s, had resumed pursuing his war-interrupted doctorate. His subject was ostensibly the protein structures of hemoglobin. In fact, he, too, was obsessed with DNA.

Working with X-ray images obtained by Rosalind E. Franklin and Maurice H F Wilkins, researchers at King’s College London, Watson and Crick eventually constructed a physical model of the molecule. The key came when Wilkins gave them access to certain images of Franklin’s, one of which, Photo 51, turned out to be the clue to the molecule’s structure. In what is widely regarded as a breach of research protocol, Wilkins provided the X-ray image to Watson and Crick without Franklin’s knowledge.

Aided by that material, the two proposed that DNA was shaped like a kind of twisted ladder whose outside “rails” were formed of molecules of sugar and phosphate. Each of the ladder’s steps was formed of two of DNA’s four chemical bases — adenine, thymine, cytosine and guanine. Adenine always paired up with thymine, and guanine always paired up with cytosine.

Enzymes within the cell could snip this twisted ladder down the middle and, using bases from within the cell, create two new DNA molecules from one.

Eager to beat their chief rival, American chemist Linus C Pauling of the California Institute of Technology, Watson and Crick wrote up their discovery and hustled it into the journal Nature. Though their paper was written in the typically flat tone of science and was barely a page long, it was clear that its authors had realized that they were onto something big.

Their proposed structure “has novel features which are of considerable biological interest,” they wrote, adding, “It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.”

In other words, they could explain how genetic instructions could move from one generation to the next.

In 1962, Watson, Wilkins and now Crick won the Nobel Prize for the work. (Pauling, bested in the DNA race, won the 1962 Nobel Peace Prize for his opposition to weapons of mass destruction; he had won the prize in chemistry, in 1954, for his work on chemical bonds.)

Wilkins, who continued researching DNA at King’s, died in 2004. Crick eventually moved to the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, where he researched theoretical neurobiology and consciousness. He died in 2004.

Watson eventually moved from Cambridge, England, to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where, in 1955, he accepted an appointment as assistant professor of biology at Harvard.

Watson’s relations with the rest of the Harvard biology faculty were fraught. He offended his departmental colleagues by dismissing evolution, taxonomy, ecology and other biological research as “stamp collecting,” saying those fields must give way to the study of molecules and cells.

“I found him the most unpleasant human being I had ever met,” one of his young colleagues, evolutionary biologist E O Wilson, wrote in a 1994 memoir, Naturalist.

It was Wilson who maintained that Watson, having achieved fame with stunning work and at an early age, had become “the Caligula of biology.”

“He was given license to say anything that came to his mind and expect to be taken seriously,” Wilson wrote. “And unfortunately, he did so, with a casual and brutal offhandedness.”

Then and later, Watson declared proudly that he was just speaking his mind. He originally chose the title “Honest Jim” for the memoir that became The Double Helix.

Crick’s initial reaction to the book was fury. He said Watson had focused on himself to the detriment of others involved in the project.

Wilkins did not much like the book, either. He and Crick objected so strenuously that Harvard University Press dropped its plans to publish the work; it appeared instead in two installments in The Atlantic Monthly and was later published by Atheneum.

The book was a bestseller. An annotated version came out in 2012, offering an even richer picture of the DNA triumph. And Crick eventually got over his anger.

At Harvard, Watson also wrote Molecular Biology of the Gene, his first in a series of notable textbooks. The book, now with co-authors in later editions, remains one of the most influential, widely used and admired texts in the history of biology.

Watson made his first visit to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, the establishment he would eventually restore to scientific prominence, in 1948.

By 1968 when he was recruited to lead it, the lab had faded from prominence. Watson more or less abandoned hands-on research to turn that situation around. With a knack for administration and fundraising, he set the lab’s focus on microbiology aimed at understanding, diagnosing and treating the genetics of cancer.

Watson also built up the lab’s educational offerings, established a graduate program, expanded its array of conferences and created a program for high school students studying DNA. That program is now “the largest high school laboratory program in genetics and biology in the world,” Stillman said last year.

And when researchers began to realize that it would be possible to decipher the entire sequence of genes in the human genome, Watson called them to a meeting at Cold Spring Harbor to discuss it. When the federal government established the Human Genome Project, it turned to Watson to be its first leader.

A “working draft” was concluded in 2000 with a list of 3 billion letters in the human genetic code. It was hailed on June 26 in televised announcements by President Bill Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

James Dewey Watson was born in Chicago on April 6, 1928, one of two children of James Dewey Watson, a debt collector for La Salle Extension University, a correspondence school based in Chicago, and the former Jean Mitchell, who worked in the University of Chicago admissions office and was active in Democratic Party politics.

James grew up on the South Side of Chicago and attended South Shore High School. At 15, he enrolled in the University of Chicago, and it was there that he encountered a book about biology, written for a lay audience by quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger. The book, “What Is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell,” convinced the young Watson that genes were the key component of living cells.

After graduating in 1947, he went on to graduate school at Indiana University, where he encountered two giants in the field, Hermann J. Muller and Salvador E. Luria. (Muller won the 1946 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in 1946 and Luria was similarly honored in 1969.)

Under Luria’s guidance, Watson received his doctorate in 1950. He then headed for Cambridge and fame.

As a young man he bemoaned his single status and made no bones about the fact that he was in search of a wife. His search ended in 1968, when, about to turn 40, he married Elizabeth Lewis, a 19-year-old sophomore of Radcliffe College at Harvard. They had two sons, Rufus and Duncan. In a 2003 interview with The Guardian, Watson described Rufus’ severe mental illness, which he called a “genetic injustice.”

He often said that his son’s illness had been “a big incentive” for him to join the genome project.

His wife, an architectural preservationist, his sons and one grandson survive him.