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  • James Watson, co-discoverer of the double-helix shape of DNA, has died at age 97

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    James D. Watson, whose co-discovery of the twisted-ladder structure of DNA in 1953 helped light the long fuse on a revolution in medicine, crimefighting, genealogy and ethics, has died. He was 97.

    The breakthrough — made when the brash, Chicago-born Watson was just 24 — turned him into a hallowed figure in the world of science for decades. But near the end of his life, he faced condemnation and professional censure for offensive remarks, including saying Black people are less intelligent than white people.

    Watson shared a 1962 Nobel Prize with Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins for discovering that deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, is a double helix, consisting of two strands that coil around each other to create what resembles a long, gently twisting ladder.

    That realization was a breakthrough. It instantly suggested how hereditary information is stored and how cells duplicate their DNA when they divide. The duplication begins with the two strands of DNA pulling apart like a zipper.

    Even among non-scientists, the double helix would become an instantly recognized symbol of science, showing up in such places as the work of Salvador Dali and a British postage stamp.

    The discovery helped open the door to more recent developments such as tinkering with the genetic makeup of living things, treating disease by inserting genes into patients, identifying human remains and criminal suspects from DNA samples, and tracing family trees and ancient human ancestors. But it has also raised a host of ethical questions, such as whether we should be altering the body’s blueprint for cosmetic reasons or in a way that is transmitted to a person’s offspring.

    “Francis Crick and I made the discovery of the century, that was pretty clear,” Watson once said. He later wrote: “There was no way we could have foreseen the explosive impact of the double helix on science and society.”

    Watson never made another lab finding that big. But in the decades that followed, he wrote influential textbooks and a best-selling memoir and helped guide the project to map the human genome. He picked out bright young scientists and helped them. And he used his prestige and contacts to influence science policy.

    Watson died in hospice care after a brief illness, his son said Friday. His former research lab confirmed he passed away a day earlier.

    “He never stopped fighting for people who were suffering from disease,” Duncan Watson said of his father.

    Watson’s initial motivation for supporting the gene project was personal: His son Rufus had been hospitalized with a possible diagnosis of schizophrenia, and Watson figured that knowing the complete makeup of DNA would be crucial for understanding that disease — maybe in time to help his son.

    He gained unwelcome attention in 2007, when the Sunday Times Magazine of London quoted him as saying he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours — where all the testing says not really.” He said that while he hopes everyone is equal, “people who have to deal with Black employees find this is not true.”

    He apologized, but after an international furor he was suspended from his job as chancellor of the prestigious Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York. He retired a week later. He had served in various leadership jobs there for nearly 40 years.

    In a television documentary that aired in early 2019, Watson was asked if his views had changed. “No, not at all,” he said. In response, the Cold Spring Harbor lab revoked several honorary titles it had given Watson, saying his statements were “reprehensible” and “unsupported by science.”

    Watson’s combination of scientific achievement and controversial remarks created a complicated legacy.

    He has shown “a regrettable tendency toward inflammatory and offensive remarks, especially late in his career,” Dr. Francis Collins, then-director of the National Institutes of Health, said in 2019. “His outbursts, particularly when they reflected on race, were both profoundly misguided and deeply hurtful. I only wish that Jim’s views on society and humanity could have matched his brilliant scientific insights.”

    Long before that, Watson scorned political correctness.

    “A goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid,” he wrote in “The Double Helix,” his bestselling 1968 book about the DNA discovery.

    For success in science, he wrote: “You have to avoid dumb people. … Never do anything that bores you. … If you can’t stand to be with your real peers (including scientific competitors) get out of science. … To make a huge success, a scientist has to be prepared to get into deep trouble.”

    It was in the fall of 1951 that the tall, skinny Watson — already the holder of a Ph.D. at 23 — arrived at Britain’s Cambridge University, where he met Crick. As a Watson biographer later said, “It was intellectual love at first sight.”

    Crick himself wrote that the partnership thrived in part because the two men shared “a certain youthful arrogance, a ruthlessness, and an impatience with sloppy thinking.”

    Together they sought to tackle the structure of DNA, aided by X-ray research by colleague Rosalind Franklin and her graduate student Raymond Gosling. Watson was later criticized for a disparaging portrayal of Franklin in “The Double Helix,” and today she is considered a prominent example of a female scientist whose contributions were overlooked. (She died in 1958.)

    Watson and Crick built Tinker Toy-like models to work out the molecule’s structure. One Saturday morning in 1953, after fiddling with bits of cardboard he had carefully cut to represent fragments of the DNA molecule, Watson suddenly realized how these pieces could form the “rungs” of a double helix ladder.

    His first reaction: “It’s so beautiful.”

    Figuring out the double helix “goes down as one of the three most important discoveries in the history of biology,” alongside Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection and Gregor Mendel’s fundamental laws of genetics, said Cold Spring Harbor lab’s president, Bruce Stillman.

    Following the discovery, Watson spent two years at the California Institute of Technology, then joined the faculty at Harvard in 1955. Before leaving Harvard in 1976, he essentially created the university’s program for molecular biology, scientist Mark Ptashne recalled in a 1999 interview.

    Watson became director of the Cold Spring Harbor lab in 1968, its president in 1994 and its chancellor 10 years later. He made the lab on Long Island an educational center for scientists and non-scientists, focused research on cancer, instilled a sense of excitement and raised huge amounts of money.

    He transformed the lab into a “vibrant, incredibly important center,” Ptashne said. It was “one of the miracles of Jim: a more disheveled, less smooth, less typically ingratiating person you could hardly imagine.”

    From 1988 to 1992, Watson directed the federal effort to identify the detailed makeup of human DNA. He created the project’s huge investment in ethics research by simply announcing it at a news conference. He later said it was “probably the wisest thing I’ve done over the past decade.”

    Watson was on hand at the White House in 2000 for the announcement that the federal project had completed an important goal: a “working draft” of the human genome, basically a road map to an estimated 90 percent of human genes.

    Researchers presented Watson with the detailed description of his own genome in 2007. It was one of the first genomes of an individual to be deciphered.

    Watson knew that genetic research could produce findings that make some people uncomfortable. In 2007, he wrote that when scientists identify genetic variants that predispose people to crime or significantly affect intelligence, the findings should be publicized rather than squelched out of political correctness.

    James Dewey Watson was born in Chicago on April 6, 1928, into “a family that believed in books, birds and the Democratic Party,” as he put it. From his birdwatcher father he inherited an interest in ornithology and a distaste for explanations that didn’t rely on reason or science.

    Watson was a precocious child who loved to read, studying books like “The World Telegraph Almanac of Facts.” He entered the University of Chicago on a scholarship at 15, graduated at 19 and earned his doctorate in zoology at Indiana University three years later.

    He got interested in genetics at age 17 when he read a book that said genes were the essence of life.

    “I thought, ‘Well, if the gene is the essence of life, I want to know more about it,’” he later recalled. “And that was fateful because, otherwise, I would have spent my life studying birds and no one would have heard of me.”

    At the time, it wasn’t clear that genes were made of DNA, at least for any life form other than bacteria. But Watson went to Europe to study the biochemistry of nucleic acids like DNA. At a conference in Italy, Watson saw an X-ray image that indicated DNA could form crystals.

    “Suddenly I was excited about chemistry,” Watson wrote in “The Double Helix.” If genes could crystallize, “they must have a regular structure that could be solved in a straightforward fashion.”

    “A potential key to the secret of life was impossible to push out of my mind,” he recalled.

    In the decades after his discovery, Watson’s fame persisted. Apple Computer used his picture in an ad campaign. At conferences, graduate students who weren’t even born when he worked at Cambridge nudged each other and whispered, “There’s Watson. There’s Watson.” They got him to autograph napkins or copies of “The Double Helix.”

    A reporter asked him 2018 if any building at the Cold Spring Harbor lab was named after him. No, Watson replied, “I don’t need a building named after me. I have the double helix.”

    His 2007 remarks on race were not the first time Watson struck a nerve with his comments. In a speech in 2000, he suggested that sex drive is related to skin color. And earlier he told a newspaper that if a gene governing sexuality were found and could be detected in the womb, a woman who didn’t want to have a gay child should be allowed to have an abortion.

    More than a half-century after winning the Nobel, Watson put the gold medal up for auction in 2014. The winning bid, $4.7 million, set a record for a Nobel. The medal was eventually returned to Watson.

    Both of Watson’s Nobel co-winners, Crick and Wilkins, died in 2004.

    ___

    Ritter is a retired AP science writer. AP science writers Christina Larson in Washington and Adithi Ramakrishnan in New York contributed to this report.

    ___

    The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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  • James Watson, Nobel Prize winner and DNA pioneer, dies

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    On a chilly February afternoon in 1953, a gangly American and a fast-talking Brit walked into the Eagle pub in Cambridge, England, and announced to the assembled imbibers that they had discovered the “secret of life.”

    Even by the grandiose standards of bar talk, it was a provocative statement. Except, it was also pretty close to the truth. That morning, James Watson, the American whiz kid who had not yet turned 25, and his British colleague, Francis Crick, had finally worked out the structure of DNA.

    Everything that followed, unlocking the human genome, learning to edit and move genetic information to cure disease and create new forms of life, the revolution in criminal justice with DNA fingerprinting, and many other things besides, grew out of the discovery of the double-helix shape of DNA.

    It took Watson decades to feel worthy of a breakthrough some consider the equal of Einstein’s famous E=MC2 formula. But he got there. “Did Francis and I deserve the double helix?” Watson asked rhetorically, 40 years later. “Yeah, we did.”

    James Dewey Watson, Nobel Prize winner and “semi-professional loose cannon” whose racist views made him a scientific pariah late in life, died Thursday in hospice care after a brief illness, his son told the Associated Press. He was 97.

    Born April 6, 1928, in Chicago, he was the son of a bill collector for a mail-order school who had written a small book about birds in northern Illinois. The younger Watson originally hoped to follow his father’s passion and become an ornithologist. “My greatest ambition had been to find out why birds migrate,” he once said. “It would have been a lost career. They still don’t know.”

    At 12, the brainy boy who read the World Almanac for pleasure appeared on the popular radio show “Quiz Kids.” As is often the case for the gifted, his teen years were trying. “I never even tried to be an adolescent,” Watson said. “I never went to teenage parties. I didn’t fit in. I didn’t want to fit in. I basically passed from being a child to an adult.”

    He was admitted to the University of Chicago at 15, under a program designed to give bright youngsters a head start in life. It was there he learned the Socratic method of inquiry by oral combat that would underlie both his remarkable achievements and the harsh judgments that would precipitate his fall from grace.

    Reading Erwin Schrodinger’s book, “What Is Life?” in his sophomore year set the aspiring ornithologist on a new course. Schrodinger suggested that a substance he called an “aperiodic crystal,” which might be a molecule, was the substance that passed on hereditary information. Watson was inspired by the idea that if such a molecule existed, he might be able to find it.

    “Goodbye bird migration,” he said, “and on to the gene.”

    Coincidentally, Oswald Avery had only the year before shown that a relatively simple compound — deoxyribonucleic acid, DNA — must play a role in transferring genetic information. He injected DNA from one type of bacterium into another, then watched as the two became the same.

    Most scientists didn’t believe the results. DNA, which is coiled up in every cell in the body, was nothing special, just sugars, phosphates and bases. They couldn’t believe this simple compound could be responsible for the myriad characteristics that make up an animal, much less a human being.

    Watson, meanwhile, had graduated and moved on to Indiana University, where he joined a cluster of scientists known as the “phage group,” whose research with viruses infecting bacteria helped launch the field of molecular biology. He often said he came “along at the right time” to solve the DNA problem, but there was more to it. “The major credit I think Jim and I deserve is for selecting the right problem and sticking to it,” Crick said many years later. “It’s true that by blundering about we stumbled on gold, but the fact remains that we were looking for gold.”

    The search began inauspiciously enough, when Watson arrived at the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University in late 1951, supposedly to study proteins. Crick was 12 years older, working on his PhD. When they met, the two found an instant camaraderie. “I’m sure Francis and I talked about guessing the structure of DNA within the first half-hour of our meeting,” Watson recalled.

    Their working method was mostly just conversation, but conversation conducted at a breakneck pace, and at high volume. So high, they were exiled to an office in a shabby shack called the Hut, where their debates would not disturb others.

    In January 1953, the brilliant American chemist Linus Pauling stole a march on them when he announced he had the answer: DNA was a triple helix, with the bases sticking out, like charms on a bracelet.

    Watson and Crick were devastated, until they realized Pauling’s scheme would not work. After seeing an X-ray image of DNA taken by crystallographer Rosalind Franklin, they built a 6-foot-tall metal model of a double helix, shaped like a spiral staircase, with the rungs made of the bases adenine and thymine, guanine and cytosine. When they finished, it was immediately apparent how DNA copies itself, by unzipping down the middle, allowing each chain to find a new partner. In Watson’s words, the final product was “too pretty” not to be true.

    American biology professor James Dewey Watson from Cambridge, Nobel laureate in medicine in 1962, explains the possibilities of future cancer treatments at a Nobel Laureate Meeting in Lindau on July 4, 1967. Watson had received the Nobel Prize together with the two British scientists Crick and Wilkins for their research on the molecular structure of nucleic acids (DNA).

    (Gerhard Rauchwetter / picture alliance via Getty Images)

    It was true, and in 1962, Watson, Crick and another researcher, Maurice Wilkins, were awarded the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine. Franklin, whose expert X-ray images solidified Watson’s conviction that DNA was a double helix, had died four years earlier of ovarian cancer. Had she lived, it’s unclear what would have happened, since Nobel rules allow only three people to share a single prize.

    In the coming years, Watson’s attitude toward Franklin became a matter of controversy, which he did little to soothe by his unchivalrous treatment of her in his 1968 book, “The Double Helix.” “By choice, she did not emphasize her feminine qualities,” he wrote, adding that she was secretive and quarrelsome.

    To his admirers, this was just “Honest Jim,” as some referred to him, being himself, a refreshing antidote to the increasingly politically correct world of science and society. But as the years passed, more controversies erupted around his “truth-telling” — he said he would not hire an overweight person because they were not ambitious, and that exposure to the sun in equatorial regions increases sexual urges — culminating with remarks in 2007 that he could not escape. He said he was “inherently gloomy” about Africa’s prospects because policies in the West were based on assumptions that the intelligence of Black people is the same as Europeans, when “all the testing says, not really.”

    He apologized “unreservedly,” but was still forced to retire as chancellor of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, the Long Island, N.Y., institution he had rescued from the brink of insolvency decades earlier. Afterward, he complained about being reduced to a “non-person,” but rekindled public outrage seven years later by insisting in a documentary that his views had not changed. This time, citing his “unsubstantiated and reckless personal opinions,” the laboratory rescinded the honorary titles it had bestowed, chancellor emeritus and honorary trustee.

    Mark Mannucci, director of the documentary “American Masters: Decoding Watson,” compared him to King Lear, a man “at the height of his powers and, through his own character flaws, was brought down.” Those sympathetic to Watson said the problem was he didn’t know any of his Black colleagues. If he had, they argued, he would have immediately renounced his prejudices.

    Following his DNA triumph, Watson spent two years at Caltech before joining the faculty at Harvard University. During this period, he worked to understand the role ribonucleic acid (RNA) plays in the synthesis of proteins that make bodily structures. If the double-stranded DNA contains the body’s master plan, the single-stranded RNA is the messenger, telling the cell’s protein factories how to build the three-dimensional shapes that make the whole. Watson’s 1965 textbook, “Molecular Biology of the Gene,” became a foundation stone of modern biology.

    As great as was his obsession with DNA, Watson’s pursuit of, and failure to obtain, female companionship was a matter of only marginally less critical mass. At Harvard, he recruited Radcliffe coeds to work in his lab, reasoning that “if you have pretty girls in the lab, you don’t have to go out.” He started attending Radcliffe parties known as jolly-ups. “Here comes this 35-year-old and he wants to come to jolly-ups,” said a biographer, Victor McElheny. “He was constantly swinging and missing.”

    His batting average improved when he met Elizabeth Vickery Lewis, a 19-year-old Radcliffe sophomore working in the Harvard lab. He married her in 1968, realizing by only days his goal of marrying before 40. On his honeymoon, he sent a postcard back to Harvard: “She’s 19; she’s beautiful; and she’s all mine.” The couple had two sons, Rufus, who developed schizophrenia in his teens, and Duncan.

    The same year, Watson finished writing “The Double Helix.” When he showed it to Crick and Wilkins, both objected to the way he characterized them and persuaded Harvard not to publish it. Watson soon found another publisher.

    It was certainly true his book could be unkind and gossipy, but that was why the public, which likely had trouble sorting out the details of crystallography and hydrogen bonds, loved it. “The Double Helix” became an international bestseller that remained in stock for many years. Eventually, Watson and Crick made up and by the time the Englishman died in 2004, they were again the boon pals they’d been 50 years earlier.

    After their discovery of DNA’s structure, the two men took divergent paths. Crick hoped to find the biological roots of consciousness, while Watson devoted himself to discovering a cure for cancer.

    After serving on a voluntary basis, Watson became director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island in 1976. It had once been a whaling village, and the humble buildings retained a rustic charm, though when Watson arrived the rustic quality was on a steep descent toward ruination. Its endowment was virtually nonexistent and money was so tight a former director mowed the lawn himself.

    As skilled at raising money as he was at solving difficult scientific problems, Watson turned the institution into a major research center that helped reveal the role of genetics in cancer. By 2019, the endowment had grown to $670 million, and the research staff had tripled. From an annual budget of $1 million, it had grown to $190 million.

    “You have to like people who have money,” Watson said in explanation of his success at resurrecting Cold Spring Harbor. “I really like rich people.” His growing eccentricity, which included untied shoelaces and hair that spiked out in all directions, completed the stock image of a distracted scientist. Acquaintances swore they saw him untie his shoelaces before meeting with a potential donor.

    In 1988, he became the first director of the $3-billion Human Genome Project, whose goal was to identify and map every human gene. He resigned four years later, after a public falling-out with the director of the National Institutes of Health. “I completely failed the test,” he said of his experience as a bureaucrat.

    Among his passions were tennis and charity work. In 2014, the year of the documentary that sealed his fate as an exile, Watson put his Nobel gold medal up for auction. He gave away virtually all the $4.1 million it fetched. The buyer, Russian billionaire Alisher Usmanov, returned it a year later, saying he felt bad the scientist had to sell possessions to support worthy causes.

    A complex, beguiling, maddening man who defied easy, or any, categorization, Watson followed his own star to the end of his life, insisting in 2016, when he was nearly 90, that he didn’t want to die until a cure for cancer was found. At the time, he was still playing tennis three times a week, with partners decades younger.

    Besides the Nobel Prize, Watson was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Eli Lilly Award in Biochemistry and the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, and was made an honorary Knight of the British Empire. Among his literary works were both scientific and popular books, from “Recombinant DNA” to “Genes, Girls, and Gamow,” a typically cheeky book recounting his twin obsessions, scientific glory and the opposite sex.

    Johnson is a former Times staff writer.

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    John Johnson

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