In 1962 he won the Nobel Prize together with Francis Crick for research on the structure of the double helix
He passed away at the age of 97. James Watsonone of the pioneers of modern molecular biology and Nobel Prize winner for Medicine in 1962. The news of his passing was confirmed by the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, the US institute of which he was director for a long time and where he spent much of his career. According to what was reported by New York TimesWatson died in a Long Island hospice.
James Watson, The genius behind the discovery of DNA
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Born in Chicago in 1928, James Dewey Watson showed from a young age a precocious talent for biology. After receiving his doctorate from Indiana University, he landed in Cambridge, where in 1951 he met Francis Crick. Together, in 1953, they published su Nature an article that described for the first time the double helix structure of DNAthanks to data obtained from X-ray images of Rosalind Franklin. At the time, Watson was just 25 years old.
In 1962, international consecration with the award Nobel Prize for Medicineshared with Crick and Maurice Wilkins. In the following years, Watson became a leading figure in the scientific community. From 1968 to 1993 he led the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, which became under his aegis one of the most prestigious research centers in the world.
Controversies and decline
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In recent decades, Watson’s career has been marked by controversies that have profoundly compromised his reputation. In 1997 he argued that a woman should be able to have an abortion if prenatal tests revealed thehomosexuality of the unborn childand hypothesized a link between skin color and sexual desire. On one occasion he said that beauty could be genetically manipulated: “people think it would be horrible if we all made beautiful girls; but I think it would be wonderful.” In 2007, he said that blacks are “not as smart as whites”; a statement that cost him the oridicule from the scientific community. He later tried to recant, placing the responsibility for the slip on the journalist who had interviewed him: “He wrote that I was worried about the people in Africa because of their low IQ… Something that cannot be said.” And he added: “It was stupid of me”, specifying that he did not consider himself racist “in the conventional sense”.
In 2014, after years of isolation and economic difficulties, he decided to sell his Nobel medal for almost 5 million dollars, purchased by a Russian billionaire who returned it to him the following year.
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