Obituary: James Watson

In February 1953, two men walked into a Cambridge pub and announced that they had found “the secret of life.” It was not a vain boast.

One was James Watson, an American biologist at the Cavendish laboratory; the other was his British research partner, Francis Crick.

His discovery – of the structure and function of deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA – ranks alongside those of Mendel and Darwin in its importance to modern science.

The full Promethean power of his achievement would emerge slowly over decades of research by fellow geneticists.

It also opened a Pandora’s box of controversial scientific and ethical issues, including human cloning, designer babies, and “Frankenstein foods.”

Demonstrating that DNA has a three-dimensional double-helix shape allowed Watson and Crick to unlock the secrets of how cells work; the means by which characteristics were transmitted from generation to generation.

“When we saw the response we had to pinch ourselves,” Watson said. “We realized it was probably true because it was so pretty.”

The discovery earned them the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1962 and a permanent place in the historical ranks of great scientific thinkers.

It also guaranteed that if they said something controversial, it would be front-page news.

And Watson had a lot to say, especially speculating about a link between race and intelligence.

When he first suggested that blacks are less intelligent, London’s Science Museum canceled a planned lecture, insisting that Watson’s views went “beyond the point of acceptable debate.”

He suggested that “when you interview fat people, you feel bad, because you know you’re not going to hire them.” And he wondered aloud if beauty not only could – but should – be encouraged genetically.

Watson was heavily criticized for saying that women should have the right to abort their unborn child if tests showed they would be homosexual.

He argued that he was simply pro-choice, that it would be equally permissible to favor gay children, and that it was simply natural to want grandchildren.

He alienated many in his own profession, calling many academic colleagues “dinosaurs,” “bums,” “fossils,” and “ancients” in his autobiography, Avoid Boring People.

In 2014, he became the first living Nobel Prize winner to auction off his medal, in part to help fund future scientific discoveries. A Russian tycoon bought it for $4.8 million and quickly returned it.

James Dewey Watson was born in Chicago on April 6, 1928 to a family that believed in “books, birds, and the Democratic Party.”

He was the only son of Jean and James, who were descendants of English, Scottish and Irish settlers.

His political interest came from his mother, who worked for the Democrats. The basement of his bungalow would be used as a polling station during election times.

His father’s passions were science and bird watching. Young Watson accompanied his father on bird-watching trips. He learned that science was a discipline that required careful observation of nature.

This left no room for faith. Raised Catholic by his mother, Watson described himself as a “fugitive from that religion.”

“The luckiest thing that ever happened to me is that my father didn’t believe in God,” he said.

The Great Depression of the 1930s caused his father’s salary to suddenly be cut in half and he had to rush to the bank to withdraw his remaining savings in time.

Watson slept in a small attic room he shared with his younger sister, Betty.

He was a skinny teenager who was told to go buy milkshakes to “fatten him up.” He was socially awkward and was expelled from school for poor grades; his work was seriously affected by an attack of scarlet fever.

“None of my teammates thought I would amount to much,” he recalled.

He did not consider himself a precocious intellect, but accepted a scholarship to the University of Chicago at the tender age of 15.

He attributed it to “my mother knowing the dean of admissions.”

College freed him from the complicated social hierarchies of school life where popularity and physical stature were paramount. It provided the environment in which a bright but awkward teenager could thrive.

Watson thought about specializing in ornithology, the study of birds, but switched to genetics, influenced by Erwin Schrodinger’s book What Is Life?

He described the University of Chicago as an “idyllic academic institution” where he was “instilled in him with the capacity for critical thinking and the ethical compulsion not to suffer fools who impeded his pursuit of the truth.”

The prevailing scientific wisdom was that genes were proteins capable of replicating themselves. The presence of DNA was dismissed as something “stupid” simply to support the protein.

Watson became fascinated by the new diffraction technique by which X-rays bounced off atoms to reveal their internal structures.

He became convinced that DNA had its own structure and was determined to find it. He thought the place to do it was England.

At Cambridge, he met Francis Crick, a trained physicist with “extraordinary conversational skills” and “the loudest laugh I have ever known.”

They began to build large-scale models of possible DNA structures and tried to fit them to the available evidence. In one of the biggest scientific controversies of all time, not all of this evidence was his.

Watson and Crick were competing with another team at King’s College London. His rivals were Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin. They got along well with him and terribly badly with her.

Wilkins corresponded with the Cambridge couple, sometimes exchanging their thoughts and views.

But Franklin was different. She was the most experienced chemist and expert in diffraction.

She, along with her student Raymond Gosling, took photographs of the patterns created by the x-rays as they bounced off DNA molecules.

Watson and Crick found Franklin “hostile” and thought she jealously guarded her research and worked in isolation.

They were dismissive and criticized his appearance, but Watson did not hesitate to take a look at his work when Wilkins offered it to him. Franklin was not asked for permission.

The key evidence was Photo 51.

It shows a blurry X-ray pattern that fascinated the Cambridge couple. They launched into a model-building frenzy, testing each theory with new information.

From this they deduced that DNA must have a three-dimensional double-helix structure, like a twisted ladder with rungs made up of alternating salt and phosphate groups.

Their key conclusions were that, if separated, each strand provided a template for creating the other and that the order of the “rungs” was a code.

If you can understand that code, they reasoned, you can discover the wonders of life.

Wilkins wrote to his rivals to congratulate them on winning what had, at times, been a bitter race.

When he received the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1962, along with Watson and Crick, Franklin did not accompany them.

Her life was cut short by ovarian cancer when she was only 37 years old.

According to the Nobel committee’s rules, only the living could be honored. His fans felt that Franklin had been fooled twice.

Later, Watson and his wife, Elizabeth, moved to Harvard. He became a biology teacher and had two sons, one of whom suffered from schizophrenia.

He then took charge of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in upstate New York, a struggling institution he is credited with turning into one of the world’s leading scientific research institutes.

In 1968 his account of the race to discover the structure of DNA, The Double Helix, was published.

It is a painful examination of history. Reviews the personalities, controversies and bitterness from their point of view. He considered calling the book Honest Jim.

But for all of Professor Watson’s academic achievements, his later career was overshadowed by his controversial public statements.

In 1990, Science magazine wrote that “to many members of the scientific community, Watson has long been a wild man, and his colleagues tend to hold their breath whenever he deviates from script.”

At a conference in 2000, Watson proved him right.

He put forward the idea that black people might have higher libidos than white people. His lecture argued that melanin, which gives color to the skin, increased sexual desire.

“That’s why there are Latin lovers,” he told the delegates. “You never have an English lover, only an English patient.”

He suggested that humanity could weed out stupid people through genetic testing. He then gave an interview that put a dent in his reputation.

While promoting his autobiography, Watson spoke to the Sunday Times.

The article cited him as “gloomy about Africa’s prospects” because “our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours, while all the evidence says they are not.”

Watson went on to admit that this “hot potato” was difficult to address and his hope was that everyone would be equal.

However, he said, “people who have to deal with black employees feel that this is not true.”

He later apologized, but his research institute stripped him of executive power and installed him as chancellor emeritus.

James Watson spent the rest of his life continually raising money for medical research, often shamelessly tugging at heartstrings.

“Nothing attracts more money than the search for a cure for a terrible disease,” he said.

He did not fail to cause a stir, warning that “Viagra is fighting evolution.”

He also argued that men should store sperm in adolescence to avoid a greater chance of fathering children with developmental difficulties.

He repeated his views on the link between race and intelligence in a 2019 documentary, after which the scientific community revoked his remaining honorary positions.

He will be remembered as the “Godfather of DNA”, the man who unraveled the secrets of life and a world-class controversialist who often put his foot in his mouth.