The last person of the famous four scientists who discovered the double-helix structure of DNA has now died: biologist and Nobel Prize laureate James Dewey Watson. According to The New York Times the scientist died in a hospice, where he had been taken this week after being treated for an infection in a hospital.
After Watson was injured in 2018 when his car ran off the road on Long Island and fell into a ditch from a six-metre-high hill, he was said to have been barely responsive. It was the beginning of an anticlimactic end to a life full of successes and self-inflicted scandals.
As a child in Chicago, James Watson especially loved birds and wanted to become an ornithologist. But he deviated from that after he published the collection of lectures What is Life (1944), by physicist (and, we now realize, pedophile) Erwin Schrödinger. He wrote that the chromosomes should contain a kind of “code script” of a person’s entire future development, although it was not yet clear how. It sparked Watson’s interest in genetics. He studied zoology at the University of Chicago and received his PhD from Indiana University in 1950 for research on viruses in bacteria. He then left for Europe, where he met the three Britons of the double-helix foursome – although ‘foursome’ may sound a bit too cheerful for their mutual relationships.
Youthfully arrogant
Watson immediately hit it off in October 1951 with molecular biologist Francis Crick (1916-2004), who was inspired by the same book by Schrödinger. They were both youthfully arrogant and could not stand stupidity, Watson wrote about this later. At the Cavendish Lab of the British University of Cambridge, the two were given a study room together so that they would not disturb others with their loud talk.
In May 1951, Watson had already met biophysicist Maurice Wilkins at a symposium in Naples. Wilkins (also 1916-2004, he died three months after Crick), who worked at King’s College London, was friends with Crick and attempted to decipher the structure of DNA using X-ray crystallography. This involves firing X-rays at molecules; The position of atoms in a molecule can be figured out using what is reflected on a photographic plate. The DNA X-ray that Wilkins showed at the Naples symposium was the first that Watson ever saw.
The last of the four, Rosalind Franklin (1920-1958), was Wilkins’ postdoc, but the two did not get along at all. In November 1951, Watson attended a seminar by Franklin at which she showed an X-ray of DNA in which she already saw a helical structure.
After that seminar, Watson and Crick presented their first DNA model, but they made such a blunder (if you think of a DNA molecule as a zipper, they had imagined the teeth on the outside in a way that is chemically very unlikely) that Cavendish lab head Lawrence Bragg took them off the subject. That was possible, because the structure of DNA was not actually their research topic. But because Bragg’s arch-rival Linus Pauling also claimed that he had almost solved the structure of DNA, the competitive Watson and Crick were allowed to continue. They were out at the beginning of 1953: their article appeared on April 25 Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid in the scientific journal Nature.
Wilkins and Franklin were not co-authors, but their “unpublished experimental results and ideas” are cited as an influence. In his book The Double Helix (1968), Watson described how this happened. He had gotten into an argument with Franklin and then Wilkins, without her knowledge, had shown him a DNA X-ray she had taken: the famous photo 51.
James Watson in 1954.
Photo ANP / Science Photo Library
Nobel Prize
As recently as 2023, Nature discussed to what extent Franklin was fooled by this and how crucial photo 51 well actually it had been for Watson and Crick. Perhaps other metrics (including Franklin’s, by the way) were more important. Maybe she knew Watson and Crick had her data. In any case, she was friendly with them until her death in 1958 from ovarian cancer (she was only 37).
She probably never knew that Watson and Crick attributed their discovery of the double helix to her data. In any case, she could no longer share in the Nobel Prize that Crick, Watson and Wilkins received in 1962, because Nobel Prizes are not awarded posthumously (nor to more than three people at the same time). And Franklin certainly never read how condescending Watson was The Double Helix wrote about her: ‘Rosy’ was a woman who had to be put in her place. The book caused a commotion; Wilkins also thought it was tasteless.
After the publication of the double helix structure at the age of 25, Watson felt somewhat lost. He returned to the US, became a lecturer and then a professor at Harvard, continued birdwatching and, in the month before he turned forty, married student Elizabeth Lewis, twenty years his junior. They had two sons, Rufus (1970) and Duncan (1972).
In 1989, Watson became the first director of the Human Genome Project; he fervently hoped that mapping all human DNA could lead to new treatments for, for example, the psychoses of his eldest son. But he left in 1992 after an argument (he thought you shouldn’t be able to patent genes). And today the website of the National Human Genome Research Institute includes a disclaimer next to Watson’s name, in which the institute distances itself from his “offensive and scientifically incorrect comments on race, nationalities, homosexuality, gender and other social topics.”
Because Watson made unashamedly sexist and racist statements again and again. In 2007 he claimed in an interview The Times that black people are less intelligent than white people. At the age of 79, he was forced to leave Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (Long Island, USA), which he had headed since 1968.
Feeling ostracized by science, Watson had his Nobel gold medal auctioned in 2014. He donated part of the more than 4 million dollars that this raised to science and other charities (and he got the medal back from the buyer). But in a documentary released in early 2019, shortly after his car accident, he reiterated his claim about race and IQ, adding that he believed the difference was genetic.
This is perhaps the irony of Watson’s life: in fact, it is thanks to him that Rosalind Franklin has gone down in history as an unsung genius and feminist icon, while he is of course the eccentric Nobel Prize winner, but will also be remembered as an archaic, small-minded jerk.
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