James Watson, who helped discover the double-helix structure of DNA that's the blueprint for human life, has died. He was 97 and died Thursday in hospice care in East Northport, New York, the New York Times reports. Watson was 25 years old when he and Francis Crick published their landmark discovery in 1953, a breakthrough that reshaped modern biology and earned them, along with Maurice Wilkins, the Nobel Prize in 1962. Their work helped make possible scientific accomplishments such as genetic engineering and the Human Genome Project, which Watson later led.
Although his scientific legacy is immense, Watson was ostracized late in life by colleagues over writings condemned as racist and sexist, per the Washington Post. His 1968 memoir, The Double Helix, angered colleagues for its candid, sometimes unflattering descriptions of colleagues, especially Rosalind Franklin, whose X-ray images were crucial to the DNA discovery but whose contributions were famously played down by Watson. He endorsed The Bell Curve, a 1994 book by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray that argued there's a connection between IQ and ethnicity, and long argued that Black people were intellectually inferior to whites. In an interview, he once said "some antisemitism is justified." His contentions eventually caused him to lose his honorary titles at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.
Watson was "the most unpleasant human being I had ever met," said Edward O. Wilson, an eminent biolotist and longtime colleague at Harvard. Still, Watson was credited with supporting the careers of young scientists, including women, and for transforming that lab into a leading center for genetics research. A Chicago native and child prodigy, Watson entered the University of Chicago at 15 and later studied under giants of genetics before his fateful collaboration with Crick at Cambridge. Watson's influence on science—through his research, writing, and institution-building—nevertheless remains monumental.
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Shut out by the scientific community, Watson was no longer offered speaking engagements, and he said he'd had to sell his Nobel medal to raise money. A Russian billionaire bought it for $4.1 million and gave it back to Watson. A driving force in his career was family pressure to live up to the accomplishments of Orson Welles by 25, the age his cousin was when he made Citizen Kane. He also said his lack of religious belief helped drive his research. "The luckiest thing that ever happened to me was that my father didn't believe in God," he said on the 50th anniversary of the publication of the double helix paper.
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