James D. Watson, whose discovery of the twisted DNA structure of DNA in 1953 helped light the long fuse in the medical awakening, in Crisis, genealogy, is dead. He was 97.
The achievement – made when the brash, Chicago-born was 24 – turned him into a hallowed figure in the world of science for decades. But toward the end of his life, he faced criticism and expertise for offensive remarks, including saying that black people are less intelligent than white people.
Watson shared the Nobel Prize with Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins for discovering that deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, is a double helix, consisting of two strands that revolve around a long lading, creating a long lading, creating a long lading, creating a long lading very precisely.
Realizing that was an achievement. It suggests that genetic information is stored at the same time and how cells replicate their DNA when they divide. Replication begins with two strands of DNA separating like a zipper.
Even among non-scientists, the double helix would become an early symbol of science, appearing in such places as the work of Salvador Dali and a British postage stamp.
The discovery helped open the door to recent developments such as taking genetic conditions, treating diseases by inserting fields into patients, identifying human remains from DNA samples and tracing family trees. But he also raises good ethical questions, such as whether we should change the body’s BoundPrint for decorative reasons or in a way that is passed on to one’s descendants.
“Francis Crick and I made the discovery of the century, that was very clear,” he once famously said. He later wrote: “There is no way we could have foreseen the explosive impact of the double helix on science and society.”
Watson never made another lab find that big. But in the decades that followed, he wrote influential textbooks and best-selling memoirs and helped guide the project to document the human genome. He took bright young scientists and helped them. And he used his fame and connections to influence science policy.
Watson died in the care of nurses after a brief illness, his son said Friday. His previous research lab confirmed that he died a day earlier.
“He never stopped fighting for people who were suffering from diseases,” said Duncan Watson of his father.
Watson’s initial motivation for supporting the Gene Project was personal
He found him disrespectful in 2007, when the Sunday Times Times of London quoted him as “naturally sweet in the hope of Africa” because “all our social principles are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours.” He said that while he hopes everyone is equal, “People who have to deal with black workers find this is not true.”
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He apologized, but only after the international suspension of his job as Chancellor of the spectacular cold spring lab in New York. He retired a week later. He had served in various leadership roles there for nearly 40 years.
In a televised interview in early 2019, Watson was asked if his views had changed. “No, no,” she said. In response, the Cold Spring Harbor Lab revoked several degrees of honor it had given Watson, saying that his “statements” were again suspect “and not supported by science.”
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Watson’s combination of scientific excellence and dissenting voices created a complex legacy.
He has shown “a sad tendency to say things that are fiery and offensive, especially late in his career,” said the director of the National Institutes of Health, expressing great concern and wishing that Jim’s views in public and in depth.
Long before that, Watson insulted political correctness.
“A large number of scientists are not only logical and difficult, but also just stupid,” he wrote “just,” he wrote “just,” he wrote “Helix,” double Holiya, “his most famous book in 1968.
To succeed in science, he wrote: “You must avoid dumb people. … If you cannot have your true peers (including great rivals), the scientist must be ready to get into trouble.”
It was at the end of 1951 that long, skinny Watson – of course the holder of a PH.D. 23 – arrived at Britain’s Cambridge University, where he met Crick. When Watson Biotor later said, “It was intellectual love at first sight.”
Crick himself wrote that the relationship flourished in part because the two men shared “a certain youthful arrogance, aggressiveness, and an impatience with obvious considerations.”
Together they sought to address the structure of DNA, aided by X-ray research by Rosalind Franklin and her graduate student Raymond Gosling. It was later criticized for portraying Franklin’s paranoia in “Double Holia,” and today it is considered a prime example of overlooked female scientists. (He died in 1958.)
Watson and Crick built toy-like models to work on molecular structure. One Saturday morning in 1953, after fiddling with bits of cardboard they had cut to simply represent pieces of the DNA molecule, Watson suddenly realized how these pieces could form a helix ladder.
His first reaction: “He’s so cute.”
After the discovery, Watson spent two years at the California Institute of Technology, then joined the faculty at Harvard in 1955.
Watson became the director of the Lay Spring Harbor Lab in 1968, its President in 1994 and its Chancellor 10 years later. He made a lab on Long Island an educational center for scientists and scientists, research focused on cancer, instilled a sense of happiness and raised a large amount of money.
He turned the lab into a “virtual, very important center,” Ptashne said. ‘It was one of Jim’s wonders: a dignified, smooth, smooth, easy-going, not-so-thinking person. “
From 1988 to 1992, Watson directed a collaborative effort to identify the detailed structure of human DNA. He created a major project investment in behavioral research simply by announcing it at a news conference. He later said it was “probably the smartest thing I’ve done in the last ten years.”
Watson was close to the White House in 2000 for the announcement that the Federal project had completed an important goal: the “draft” of the human genome, basically a three-fold map of 90 genes.
Researchers presented Watson with a detailed description of its genome in 2007. It was one of the first cities of man to be honored.
Watson knew that genetic research could produce findings that made some people uncomfortable. In 2007, he wrote that when scientists identify genes that predispose people to crime or significantly affect intelligence, the findings should be exposed rather than reduced to political correctness.
James Dewey Watson was born in Chicago on April 6, 1928, “in a family that believed in books, birds and the democratic party,” as he put it. From his birdwatcher father he inherited ornithology and discure for explanations that do not rely on logic or science.
Watson was a sheltered child who loved to read, reading books such as “The Telegraph Almanac World of Facts.” He entered the University of Chicago on a scholarship at 15, graduated at 19 and received his doctorate in Zoology at Indiana University three years later.
He found the desire to study genetics at the age of 17 when he read a book that said genes were the essence of life.
“I thought, ‘Well, if type is the essence of life, I want to know more about it,'” he later recalled. “And that was a wonderful thing because, otherwise, I would have spent my life studying birds and nobody would have heard of me.”
At the time, it was not clear that genes were made of DNA, at least in any life form other than bacteria. But Watson went to Europe to study the biochemistry of acetic acids like DNA. At a conference in Italy, Watson saw an X-ray image that showed DNA could form crystals.
“All of a sudden I’m excited about chemistry,” Watson wrote in Double Helix. ” If a gene can cry, “they must have a common structure that can be resolved in a specific way.”
He recalled: “The possible key to the secret of life was impossible to push from my mind.
Decades after his discovery, Watson’s fame persisted. Apple Computer used his image in an advertising campaign. At conferences, graduate students who were never born when he worked at Cambridge huddle together and whisper, “There’s a Watson. There’s a Watson.” They get him autographs or copies of the “double helix.”
A reporter asked him in 2018 if any building at Cold Spring Harbor Lab was named. No, Watson replied: “I don’t need a named structure. I have a double helix.”
His 2007 comments on the competition weren’t the first time Watson had hit a nerve with his comments. In a speech in 2000, he suggested that sex drive is related to skin color. And he previously told the newspaper that if the genes that control sex were discovered and could be found in the womb, a woman who did not want to have a gay child should be allowed to have an abortion.
More than half a year after winning the Nobel, Watson put the medical gold at auction in 2014. The winning bid, $4.7 million, set a Nobel record. The Medal was eventually returned to Watson.
Both co-winners of the Watson Nobel, Crick and Wilkins, died in 2004.
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Ritter is a retired AP science writer. AP science writers Christina Larson in Washington and Adithi Ramakrishnan in New York contributed to this report.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s science department. AP is responsible for all content.
