James Watson, co-discoverer of DNA’s double-helix shape, dies at 97
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James D. Watson, the brilliant but controversial American biologist whose 1953 discovery of the structure of DNA, the molecule of heredity, ushered in the era of genetics and provided the foundation for the biotechnology revolution of the late 20th century, has died at the age of 97.
His death was confirmed by the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, where he worked for many years. The New York Times reported that Watson died this week in a hospice on Long Island.
In his later years, Watson’s reputation was tarnished by comments on genetics and race that led to his being ostracized by the scientific establishment.
Even as a young man, he was known for his writings and his extremely gruff personality – including his willingness to use another scientist’s data to advance his career – as much as for his science.
His 1968 memoir, double helixThere was a harsh, thoughtless statement about how he and British physicist Francis Crick were the first to determine the three-dimensional shape of DNA. This achievement earned both of them a share of the 1962 Nobel Prize in Medicine and ultimately led to genetic engineering, gene therapy, and other DNA-based medicine and technology.
Crick complained that the book “severely invaded my privacy” and another colleague, Maurice Wilkins, objected to what he called “a distorted and unfavorable image of scientists” as ambitious planners willing to deceive colleagues and competitors in order to make a discovery.
Furthermore, Watson and Crick, who conducted their research at the University of Cambridge in England, were widely criticized for using raw data collected by X-ray crystallographer Rosalind Franklin to construct their model of DNA – without fully acknowledging her contributions. as watson put it double helix, Scientific research believes that there is “the contradictory pull of ambition and a sense of fair play.”
A Pennsylvania child with a rare genetic condition has been successfully treated with a tailor-made therapy using gene-editing technology partially developed by a Vancouver-based company, raising hopes it could be used for a range of conditions.
In 2007, Watson again caused widespread anger when he told the Times of London that he believed testing indicated that the intelligence of Africans was “really … not like ours.”
Shortly afterwards he was forced to retire from his position as Chancellor of New York’s Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL), accused of promoting long-discredited racist theories. Although he later apologized, he made similar comments in a 2019 documentary.
Model of spiral staircase prepared
James Dewey Watson was born on April 6, 1928, in Chicago and graduated from the University of Chicago with a zoology degree in 1947. He received his doctorate from Indiana University, where he focused on genetics. In 1951, he joined the Cavendish Lab in Cambridge, where he met Crick and began exploring the structural chemistry of DNA.
The double helix opened the doors to the genetics revolution. In the structure proposed by Crick and Watson, the rungs of the spiral staircase were made up of pairs of chemicals called nucleotides or bases. As he wrote at the end of his 1953 paper, “It has not escaped our attention that the specific pairing we have envisaged immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.”
That sentence, often called the greatest understatement in the history of biology, meant that the base-and-helix structure provides the mechanism by which genetic information can be accurately copied from one generation to the next. That understanding led to the discovery of genetic engineering and many other DNA technologies.
After DNA research, Watson and Crick went their separate ways. Watson was then only 25 years old and although he made no other scientific discoveries that came close to the importance of the double helix, he remained a scientific force.
Mark Patschne, a biologist who met Watson in the 1960s and remains a friend, told Reuters in a 2012 interview, “Having achieved what he did at such a young age, he had to figure out what he wanted to do with his life.” “They’ve figured out how to do things that suit their strengths.”
That strength led him to play the role of a “tough Irishman”, as Patshney called it, to become one of the first American leaders to leapfrog to the forefront of molecular biology. Watson joined the biology department of Harvard University in 1956.
From 1988 to 1992, Watson directed a US federal effort to identify the detailed structure of human DNA. He invested heavily in ethical research into the project by announcing it at a news conference. He later said it was “probably the smartest thing we’ve done in the last decade.”
Watson was present at the White House in 2000 for the announcement that the federal project had accomplished a key goal: a “working draft” of the human genome, a road map to an originally estimated 90 percent of human genes.
Researchers presented Watson with a detailed description of its own genome in 2007. It was one of the first genomes of a person to be deciphered.
