DNA pioneer James Watson has died ― colleagues wrestle with his legacy

[aum]

The co-discoverer of the structure of DNA helped to strengthen a US research institute and wrote a classic textbook, but also earned a reputation for racist and sexist comments.

 

Watson shared in the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his role in elucidating the structure of DNA. Credit: AP

 

James Dewey Watson – who won the Nobel Prize for his role in divining the structure of DNA; was instrumental in initiating and propelling the Human Genome Project; and who became notorious for his history of racist and sexist comments – has died at 97.

 

The discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA paved the way for scientists to unravel the mechanisms behind genetic inheritance and how cells synthesize proteins. Gene therapies, the sequencing of the human genome and the development of monoclonal antibodies as treatments for cancer are just a few of the developments that would not have been possible without an understanding of DNA’s structure.

 

“The elucidation of the structure of the double helix goes down, along with Mendel and Darwin, as the three greatest discoveries in biology,” says Bruce Stillman, president of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, where Watson had various positions.

Landmark paper

Watson and Francis Crick, who worked together at the University of Cambridge, UK, solved the structure of DNA within a few years of their first meeting. In 1953, they published a seminal paper in Nature titled “A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid”. Watson had just turned 25.

 

“For him, nothing was impossible,” says Robert Martienssen, a geneticist at Cold Spring Harbor. “Nothing was out of reach.”

 

But the discovery of the DNA helix also became enmeshed in controversy. Watson and Crick elucidated the complex structure with the help of data and ideas from Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins, who were working at King’s College London at the time. Some of these data were shared without Franklin’s permission. Wilkins was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962 with Watson and Crick. Franklin had died of ovarian cancer 4 years earlier at the age of 37, and so was ineligible for the award.

 

Watson and Crick, “could have — and should have — requested permission to use the data and made clear exactly what they had done, first to Franklin and Wilkins, and then to the rest of the world,” wrote Matthew Cobb, and Nathaniel Comfort, historians of science at the University of Manchester, UK, and Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, respectively, in a 2023 essay on Franklin.

 

In the aftermath of the discovery, Watson was particularly unkind about Franklin and dismissive of the role of women in science generally. In a best-selling book about the discovery of the double helix, he criticized Franklin’s appearance and wrote, “The thought could not be avoided that the best home for a feminist was in another person's lab.”

No answers

Colleagues who were close to Watson have long had to wrestle with his mixed legacy. Nancy Hopkins, a molecular biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, says that Watson convinced her to pursue her PhD, at a time when few women pursued careers in science. When she launched her own lab and feared she might not get tenure, Watson convinced her to push on. “Just keep working and when you come up for tenure, if the letters are good enough, you’ll get tenure. Or I’ll sue them,” Hopkins says Watson told her.

 

Hopkins later became a vocal advocate for women in science and says that she is just one of many women Watson trained and supported. She also says she is bewildered by Watson’s rhetoric on race.

 

A 2001 lecture at the University of California, Berkeley, left many in the audience stunned when Watson made remarks linking skin colour to sexual libido, and thinness to ambition.

 

“That was the beginning of the end,” Hopkins says of the lecture. “What happened later on, I just don’t know the answer.”

 

In 2007, Watson abandoned a book tour after asserting that he thought Black people are less intelligent than white people. At the time, he was still active at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where he had once been the director and had helped to make the lab a pre-eminent scientific institution. But he was removed from his leadership roles at the lab for his statements about race and intelligence. The institution severed ties with him completely after he made similar remarks in 2020. He also had a history of anti-Semitic comments, such as a 2007 remark that “Some anti-Semitism is justified.”

Influential textbook

Watson authored a number of influential books. His most famous is The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA, which has since been criticized, particularly for his treatment of Franklin.

 

But an earlier textbook, The Molecular Biology of the Gene, “was highly influential,” Cobb said via email, and “shaped the ideas of generations of scientists. … As a superlative teacher, Watson had his finger on the pulse of the young generation in a way that, say, Crick did not.”

 

Alexander Gann, who studies gene expression at Cold Spring Harbor, says that the book was written in a style that was unusually accessible for the time and defined the field of molecular biology. “It was unlike any other textbook ever written,” he says. “And it changed how other textbooks were written thereafter.”

 

Stillman, who worked under Watson for several years at Cold Spring Harbor before succeeding him as director and president of the institution, says that Watson was a caring person.

 

“He really did care about people,” he says. “This was evidenced by the fact that he was the only faculty member at Harvard in the 1950s and 60s that nurtured the careers of young women.”

 

He says that doesn’t believe that Watson was a racist and points to his advocacy for funding research into the ethical, legal and social implications of sequencing the human genome, a project that Watson spearheaded in the late 1980s and early 1990s, long before most people thought that such a feat was possible.

 

Stillman adds, “Later on, he made some comments which I disagreed with. And we had lots of discussions about that.” He and other colleagues wonder whether these comments will win out over the other parts of Watson’s legacy.

 

“In a hundred years’ time, I think people will remember the double helix,” Stillman says.

 

Source

Edited November 8, 2025 by aum

[coopers]

many years after, people will admit he was totally correct.