Monday, November 10, 2025

A00159 - James Watson, Co-Discoverer of the DNA Double Helix Structure

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James Watson
Watson, c. 2006
Born
James Dewey Watson

April 6, 1928
Chicago, Illinois, U.S.
DiedNovember 6, 2025 (aged 97)
East Northport, New York, U.S.
Education
Known for
Spouse
Elizabeth Lewis
 
​
(m. 1968)​
Children2
Awards
Scientific career
FieldsGenetics
Institutions
See list
ThesisThe Biological Properties of X‑Ray Inactivated Bacteriophage (1951)
Doctoral advisorSalvador Luria
Doctoral students
Other notable students
See list

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James Watson (born April 6, 1928, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.—died November 6, 2025, East Northport, New York) was an American geneticist and biophysicist who played a crucial role in the discovery of the molecular structure of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), the substance that is the basis of heredity. For this accomplishment he was awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins.

Research

Watson enrolled at the University of Chicago when only 15 and graduated in 1947. From his virus research at Indiana University (Ph.D., 1950), and from the experiments of Canadian-born American bacteriologist Oswald Avery, which proved that DNA affects hereditary traits, Watson became convinced that the gene could be understood only after something was known about nucleic acid molecules. He learned that scientists working in the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge were using photographic patterns made by X-rays that had been shot through protein crystals to study the structure of protein molecules.

DNA structure
DNA structureThe initial proposal of the structure of DNA by James Watson and Francis Crick was accompanied by a suggestion on the means of replication.

After working at the University of Copenhagen, where he first determined to investigate DNA, he did research at the Cavendish Laboratory (1951–53). There Watson learned X-ray diffraction techniques and worked with Crick on the problem of DNA structure. In 1952 he determined the structure of the protein coat surrounding the tobacco mosaic virus but made no dramatic progress with DNA. Suddenly, in the spring of 1953, Watson saw that the essential DNA components—four organic bases—must be linked in definite pairs. This discovery was the key factor that enabled Watson and Crick to formulate a molecular model for DNA—a double helix, which can be likened to a spiraling staircase or a twisting ladder. The DNA double helix consists of two intertwined sugar-phosphate chains, with the flat base pairs forming the steps between them. Watson and Crick’s model also shows how the DNA molecule could duplicate itself. Thus, it became known how genes, and eventually chromosomes, duplicate themselves. Watson and Crick published their epochal discovery in two papers in the British journal Nature in April–May 1953. Their research answered one of the fundamental questions in genetics.

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James Dewey Watson (April 6, 1928 – November 6, 2025) was an American molecular biologist, geneticist, and zoologist. In 1953, he and Francis Crick co-authored an academic paper in Nature proposing the double helix structure of the DNA molecule. In 1962, Watson, Crick, and Maurice Wilkins were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material".

Watson earned degrees at the University of Chicago (Bachelor of Science, 1947) and Indiana University Bloomington (PhD, 1950). After a post-doctoral year at the University of Copenhagen with Herman Kalckar and Ole Maaløe, Watson worked at the University of Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory in England, where he met his future collaborator Francis Crick. From 1956 to 1976, Watson was employed by the faculty of the Harvard University Biology Department, promoting research in molecular biology.

From 1968, Watson served as the director of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) in Laurel Hollow, New York, greatly expanding its level of funding and research. At CSHL, he shifted his research emphasis to the study of cancer, along with making it a world-leading research center in molecular biology. In 1994, Watson started as president and served for 10 years. He was then appointed chancellor, serving until his resignation in 2007 after making comments claiming that there is a genetic link between race and intelligence. In 2019, after the broadcast of a documentary where Watson reiterated these views on race and genetics, CSHL revoked his honorary titles and severed all ties with him.

Watson wrote many science books, including the textbook Molecular Biology of the Gene (1965) and his bestselling book The Double Helix (1968). Between 1988 and 1992, Watson was associated with the National Institutes of Health, helping to establish the Human Genome Project, which completed the task of mapping the human genome in 2003.

Early life and education

James Dewey Watson was born in Chicago on April 6, 1928,[1] the only son of Jean (née Mitchell) and James D. Watson, a businessman descended mostly from colonial English immigrants to America.[2] His maternal grandfather, Lauchlin Mitchell, a tailor, was from Glasgow, Scotland and his maternal grandmother, Lizzie Gleason, was the child of parents from County Tipperary, Ireland.[3] Watson's mother was a modestly religious Catholic and his father an Episcopalian who had lost his belief in God.[4] Watson grew up Catholic, but he later described himself as "an escapee from the Catholic religion".[5] Watson said, "The luckiest thing that ever happened to me was that my father didn't believe in God."[6] By age 11, Watson stopped attending mass and embraced the "pursuit of scientific and humanistic knowledge."[4]

Watson grew up on the South Side of Chicago and attended public schools, including Horace Mann Elementary School and South Shore High School.[2][7] He was fascinated with bird watching, a hobby shared with his father,[8] so Watson considered majoring in ornithology.[9] He appeared on Quiz Kids, a popular radio show that challenged bright youngsters to answer questions.[10] Thanks to the liberal policy of university president Robert Hutchins, Watson enrolled at the University of Chicago, where he was awarded a tuition scholarship at age 15.[2][9][11] Among his professors was Louis Leon Thurstone, from whom Watson learned about factor analysis, which he later referenced on his controversial views on race.[12]

After reading Erwin Schrödinger's book What Is Life? in 1946, Watson changed his professional ambitions from the study of ornithology to genetics.[13] Watson earned his Bachelor of Science degree in zoology from the University of Chicago the following year.[9] In his autobiography, Avoid Boring People, Watson described the University of Chicago as an "idyllic academic institution where he was instilled with the capacity for critical thought and an ethical compulsion not to suffer fools who impeded his search for truth", in contrast to his description of later experiences. In 1947, Watson left the University of Chicago to become a graduate student at Indiana University, attracted by the presence at Bloomington of the 1946 Nobel Prize winner Hermann Joseph Muller, who in crucial papers published in 1922, 1929, and in the 1930s had laid out all the basic properties of the heredity molecule that Schrödinger presented in his 1944 book.[14] Watson received his Doctor of Philosophy degree from Indiana University Bloomington in 1950; Salvador Luria was his doctoral advisor.[9][15]

Career and research

Luria, Delbrück, and the Phage Group

Originally, Watson was drawn into molecular biology by the work of Salvador Luria. Luria eventually shared the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on the Luria–Delbrück experiment, which concerned the nature of genetic mutations. He was part of a distributed group of researchers who were making use of the viruses that infect bacteria, called bacteriophages. He and Max Delbrück were among the leaders of this new "Phage Group", an important movement of geneticists from experimental systems such as Drosophila towards microbial genetics. Early in 1948, Watson began his PhD research in Luria's laboratory at Indiana University.[15] That spring, he met Delbrück first in Luria's apartment and again that summer during Watson's first trip to the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.[16][17]

The Phage Group was the intellectual medium where Watson became a working scientist. Importantly, the members of the Phage Group sensed that they were on the path to discovering the physical nature of the gene. In 1949, Watson took a course with Felix Haurowitz that included the conventional view of that time: that genes were proteins and able to replicate themselves.[18] The other major molecular component of chromosomes, DNA, was widely considered to be a "stupid tetranucleotide", serving only a structural role to support the proteins.[19] Even at this early time, Watson, under the influence of the Phage Group, was aware of the Avery–MacLeod–McCarty experiment, which suggested that DNA was the genetic molecule. Watson's research project involved using X-rays to inactivate bacterial viruses.[20]

Watson then went to Copenhagen University in September 1950 for a year of postdoctoral research, first heading to the laboratory of biochemist Herman Kalckar.[2] Kalckar was interested in the enzymatic synthesis of nucleic acids, and he wanted to use phages as an experimental system. Watson wanted to explore the structure of DNA, and his interests did not coincide with Kalckar's.[21] After working part of the year with Kalckar, Watson spent the remainder of his time in Copenhagen conducting experiments with microbial physiologist Ole Maaløe, then a member of the Phage Group.[22]

The experiments, of which Watson became aware at the previous summer's Cold Spring Harbor phage conference, employed radioactive phosphate as a tracer to identify which molecular components of bacteriophage particles are responsible for infecting the host bacteria during viral entry.[21] The intention was to determine whether protein or DNA was the genetic material, but upon consultation with Max Delbrück,[21] they determined that their results were inconclusive and could not specifically identify the newly labeled molecules as DNA.[23] Watson never developed a constructive interaction with Kalckar, but he did accompany Kalckar to a meeting in Italy, where Watson saw Maurice Wilkins talk about X-ray diffraction data for DNA.[2] Watson had become firmly convinced that DNA possessed a distinct molecular structure amenable to precise elucidation.[24]

In 1951, the chemist Linus Pauling in California published his model of the amino acid alpha helix, a result that grew out of Pauling's efforts in X-ray crystallography and molecular model building. After obtaining some results from his phage and other experimental research[25] conducted at Indiana University, Statens Serum Institut (Denmark), CSHL, and the California Institute of Technology, Watson now had the desire to learn to perform X-ray diffraction experiments so he could work to determine the structure of DNA. That summer, Luria met John Kendrew,[26] and he arranged for a new postdoctoral research project for Watson in England.[2] In 1951, Watson visited the Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn in Naples.[27]

Identifying the double helix

DNA model built by Crick and Watson in 1953, in the Science Museum, London

In mid-March 1953, Watson and Crick deduced the double helix structure of DNA.[2] Crucial to their discovery were the experimental data collected at King's College London—mainly by Rosalind Franklin, for whom they did not provide proper attribution.[28][29] Sir Lawrence Bragg,[30] the director of the Cavendish Laboratory (where Watson and Crick worked), made the original announcement of the discovery at a Solvay conference on proteins in Belgium on April 8, 1953; it went unreported by the press. Watson and Crick submitted a paper entitled "Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid" to the scientific journal Nature, which was published on April 25, 1953.[31]

Sydney Brenner, Jack Dunitz, Dorothy Hodgkin, Leslie Orgel, and Beryl M. Oughton were some of the first people in April 1953 to see the model of the structure of DNA, constructed by Crick and Watson; at the time, they were working at Oxford University's chemistry department. All were impressed by the new DNA model, especially Brenner, who subsequently worked with Crick at Cambridge in the Cavendish Laboratory and the new Laboratory of Molecular Biology. According to the late Beryl Oughton, later Rimmer, they all travelled together in two cars once Hodgkin announced to them that they were off to Cambridge to see the model of the structure of DNA.[32]

Watson's name on New York City's Nobel Monument; it lists American laureates only, not Crick and Wilkins who shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

The Cambridge University student newspaper Varsity ran its own short article on the discovery on May 30, 1953. Watson subsequently presented a paper on the double-helical structure of DNA at the 18th Cold Spring Harbor Symposium on Viruses in early June 1953, six weeks after the publication of the Watson and Crick paper in Nature. Many at the meeting had not yet heard of the discovery. The 1953 Cold Spring Harbor Symposium was the first opportunity for many to see the model of the DNA double helix. Watson, Crick, and Wilkins were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962 for their research on the structure of nucleic acids.[2][33][34] Rosalind Franklin had died in 1958 and was therefore ineligible for nomination.[28] The publication of the double helix structure of DNA has been described as a turning point in science; understanding of life was fundamentally changed and the modern era of biology began.[35]

Interactions with Rosalind Franklin and Raymond Gosling

Watson and Crick's use of DNA X-ray diffraction data collected by Rosalind Franklin and her student Raymond Gosling attracted scrutiny. It has been argued that Watson and his colleagues did not properly acknowledge colleague Rosalind Franklin for her contributions to the discovery of the double helix structure.[29][36] Robert P. Crease notes that "Such stingy behaviour may not be unknown, or even uncommon, among scientists".[37] Franklin's high-quality X-ray diffraction patterns of DNA were unpublished results, which Watson and Crick used without her knowledge or consent in their construction of the double helix model of DNA.[36][28][38] Franklin's results provided estimates of the water content of DNA crystals and these results were consistent with the two sugar-phosphate backbones being on the outside of the molecule. Franklin told Crick and Watson that the backbones had to be on the outside; before then, Linus Pauling and Watson and Crick had erroneous models with the chains inside and the bases pointing outwards.[14] Her identification of the space group for DNA crystals revealed to Crick that the two DNA strands were antiparallel.[14]

The X-ray diffraction images collected by Gosling and Franklin provided the best evidence for the helical nature of DNA. Watson and Crick had three sources for Franklin's unpublished data:

  1. Her 1951 seminar, attended by Watson;[39]
  2. Discussions with Wilkins,[40] who worked in the same laboratory with Franklin;
  3. A research progress report that was intended to promote coordination of Medical Research Council-supported laboratories.[41] Watson, Crick, Wilkins and Franklin all worked in MRC laboratories.

In a 1954 article, Watson and Crick acknowledged that, without Franklin's data, "the formulation of our structure would have been most unlikely, if not impossible".[42] In The Double Helix, Watson later admitted that "Rosy, of course, did not directly give us her data. For that matter, no one at King's realized they were in our hands". In recent years, Watson garnered controversy in the popular and scientific press for his "misogynist treatment" of Franklin and his failure to properly attribute her work on DNA.[29] According to one critic, Watson's portrayal of Franklin in The Double Helix was negative, giving the impression that she was Wilkins' assistant and was unable to interpret her own DNA data.[43] Watson's accusation was indefensible since Franklin told Crick and Watson that the helix backbones had to be on the outside.[14] From a 2003 piece by Brenda Maddox in Nature:[29]

Other comments dismissive of "Rosy" in Watson's book caught the attention of the emerging women's movement in the late 1960s. "Clearly Rosy had to go or be put in her place ... Unfortunately Maurice could not see any decent way to give Rosy the boot". And, "Certainly a bad way to go out into the foulness of a ... November night was to be told by a woman to refrain from venturing an opinion about a subject for which you were not trained."

Robert P. Crease remarks that "[Franklin] was close to figuring out the structure of DNA, but did not do it. The title of 'discoverer' goes to those who first fit the pieces together".[37] Jeremy Bernstein rejects that Franklin was a "victim" and states that "[Watson and Crick] made the double-helix scheme work. It is as simple as that".[37] Matthew Cobb and Nathaniel C. Comfort write that "Franklin was no victim in how the DNA double helix was solved" but that she was "an equal contributor to the solution of the structure".[42]

A review of the correspondence from Franklin to Watson, in the archives at CSHL, revealed that the two scientists later exchanged constructive scientific correspondence. Franklin consulted with Watson on her tobacco mosaic virus RNA research. Franklin's letters were framed with the normal and unremarkable forms of address, beginning with "Dear Jim", and concluding with "Best Wishes, Yours, Rosalind". Each of the scientists published their own unique contributions to the discovery of the structure of DNA in separate articles, and all of the contributors published their findings in the same volume of Nature. These classic molecular biology papers are identified as: Watson J. D. and Crick F. H. C. "A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid". Nature 171, 737–738 (1953);[31] Wilkins M. H. F., Stokes A. R. & Wilson H. R. "Molecular Structure of Deoxypentose Nucleic Acids". Nature 171, 738–740 (1953);[44] Franklin R. and Gosling R. G. "Molecular Configuration in Sodium Thymonucleate". Nature 171, 740–741 (1953).[45]

Harvard University

In 1956, Watson accepted a position in the biology department at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His work at Harvard focused on RNA and its role in the transfer of genetic information.[46] He continued to be a member of the Harvard faculty until 1976, even though he took over the directorship of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory eight years prior.[46]

During his tenure at Harvard, Watson participated in a protest against the Vietnam War, leading a group of 12 biologists and biochemists calling for "the immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces from Vietnam".[47] In 1975, on the thirtieth anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, Watson was one of over 2,000 scientists and engineers who spoke out against nuclear proliferation to President Gerald Ford, arguing that there was no proven method for the safe disposal of radioactive waste, and that nuclear plants were a security threat due to the possibility of terrorist theft of plutonium.[48]

Watson's first textbook, The Molecular Biology of the Gene, used the concept of heads—brief declarative subheadings.[49] His next textbook was Molecular Biology of the Cell, in which he coordinated the work of a group of scientist-writers. His third was Recombinant DNA, which described the ways in which genetic engineering had brought new information about how organisms function.[50]

Publishing The Double Helix

In 1968, Watson wrote The Double Helix,[51] listed by the board of the Modern Library as number seven in their list of 100 Best Nonfiction books.[52] The book details the story of the discovery of the structure of DNA, as well as the personalities, conflicts and controversy surrounding their work, and includes many of his private emotional impressions at the time. Watson's original title was to have been "Honest Jim".[53] Controversy surrounded the publication of the book. Watson's book was originally to be published by the Harvard University Press, but Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins, among others, objected. Watson's home university dropped the project and the book was commercially published.[54][55] In an interview with Anne Sayre for her book, Rosalind Franklin and DNA (published in 1975 and reissued in 2000), Francis Crick said that he regarded Watson's book as a "contemptible pack of damned nonsense".[56]

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

External videos
video icon "James Watson: Why society isn't ready for genomic-based medicine", 2012, Chemical Heritage Foundation

In 1968, Watson was appointed director of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Their two sons were born between 1970 and 1972, and by 1974, the family had established a permanent residence in Cold Spring Harbor. Watson led the laboratory as director and president for approximately 35 years, subsequently serving as its chancellor and, later, chancellor emeritus.[57]

In his roles as director, president, and chancellor, Watson led CSHL to articulate its present-day mission, "dedication to exploring molecular biology and genetics in order to advance the understanding and ability to diagnose and treat cancers, neurological diseases, and other causes of human suffering."[58] Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory substantially expanded both its research and its science educational programs under Watson's direction. He is credited with "transforming a small facility into one of the world's great education and research institutions. Initiating a program to study the cause of human cancer, scientists under his direction have made major contributions to understanding the genetic basis of cancer."[59] In a retrospective summary of Watson's accomplishments there, Bruce Stillman, the laboratory's president, said, "Jim Watson created a research environment that is unparalleled in the world of science."[59]

In 2007, Watson said, "I turned against the left wing because they don't like genetics, because genetics implies that sometimes in life we fail because we have bad genes. They want all failure in life to be due to the evil system."[60]

Human Genome Project

Watson in 1992

In 1990, Watson was appointed as the head of the Human Genome Project at the National Institutes of Health, a position he held until April 10, 1992.[61] Watson left the Genome Project after conflicts with the new NIH Director, Bernadine Healy. He was opposed to Healy's attempts to acquire patents on gene sequences, and any ownership of the "laws of nature". Two years before stepping down from the Genome Project, Watson had stated his own opinion on this long and ongoing controversy which he saw as an illogical barrier to research; Watson said, "The nations of the world must see that the human genome belongs to the world's people, as opposed to its nations." He left within weeks of the 1992 announcement that the NIH would be applying for patents on brain-specific cDNAs.[62] (The issue of the patentability of genes has since been resolved in the US by the US Supreme Court; see Association for Molecular Pathology v. U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.)

In 1994, Watson became president of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Francis Collins took over the role as director of the Human Genome Project.[57] In 1997, Watson was quoted in The Sunday Telegraph, stating: "If you could find the gene which determines sexuality and a woman decides she doesn't want a homosexual child, well, let her."[63] The biologist Richard Dawkins wrote a letter to The Independent claiming that Watson's position was misrepresented by The Sunday Telegraph article, and that Watson would equally consider the possibility of having a heterosexual child to be just as valid as any other reason for abortion, to emphasize that Watson is in favor of allowing choice.[64]

On the issue of obesity, Watson was quoted in 2000, saying: "Whenever you interview fat people, you feel bad, because you know you're not going to hire them."[65] Watson repeatedly supported genetic screening and genetic engineering in public lectures and interviews, arguing that stupidity is a disease and the "really stupid" bottom 10% of people should be cured.[66] He also suggested that beauty could be genetically engineered, saying in 2003, "People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty. I think it would be great."[66][67]

In 2007, Watson became the second person[68] (after Craig Venter) to publish his fully sequenced genome online,[69] after it was presented to him on May 31, 2007, by 454 Life Sciences Corporation[70] in collaboration with scientists at the Human Genome Sequencing Center, Baylor College of Medicine. Watson was quoted as saying, "I am putting my genome sequence on line to encourage the development of an era of personalized medicine, in which information contained in our genomes can be used to identify and prevent disease and to create individualized medical therapies".[71][72][73]

Later life

In 2014, Watson published a paper in The Lancet suggesting that biological oxidants may have a different role than is thought in diseases including diabetes, dementia, heart disease and cancer. For example, type 2 diabetes is usually thought to be caused by oxidation in the body that causes inflammation and kills off pancreatic cells. Watson thought the root of that inflammation was different: "a lack of biological oxidants, not an excess", and discussed this in detail. One critical response was that the idea was neither new nor worthy of merit, and that The Lancet published Watson's paper only because of his name.[74] Other scientists expressed their support for his hypothesis and proposed that it could also be expanded to why a lack of oxidants can result in cancer and its progression.[75]

In 2014, Watson sold his Nobel Prize medal to raise money after complaining of being made an "unperson" following controversial statements he had made.[76] Part of the funds raised by the sale went to support scientific research.[77] The medal sold at auction at Christie's in December 2014 for US$4.1 million. Watson intended to contribute the proceeds to conservation work on Long Island and to funding research at Trinity College, Dublin.[78][79] He was the first living Nobel recipient to auction a medal.[80] The medal was later returned to Watson by the purchaser, Alisher Usmanov.[81]

Notable former students

Several of Watson's former doctoral students subsequently became notable in their own right including, Mario Capecchi,[82] Bob Horvitz, Peter B. Moore and Joan Steitz.[83] Besides numerous PhD students, Watson also supervised postdoctoral researchers and other interns including Ewan Birney,[84] Ronald W. Davis, Phillip Allen Sharp (postdoc), John Tooze (postdoc),[85][86] and Richard J. Roberts (postdoc).[87]

Other affiliations

Watson in 2003

Watson was a member of the Board of Directors of United Biomedical, Inc., founded by Chang Yi Wang. He held the position for six years and retired from the board in 1999.[88] In January 2007, Watson accepted the invitation of Leonor Beleza, president of the Champalimaud Foundation, to become the head of the foundation's scientific council, an advisory organ.[89][90]

In March 2017, Watson was named head consultant of the Cheerland Investment Group, a Chinese investment company which sponsored his trip.[91] He was an institute adviser for the Allen Institute for Brain Science.[92][93]

Avoid Boring People

Watson signing autographs after a speech at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on April 30, 2007

Watson had disagreements with Craig Venter regarding his use of EST fragments while Venter worked at National Institutes of Health. Venter went on to found Celera genomics and continued his feud with Watson. Watson was quoted as calling Venter "Hitler".[94]

In his 2007 memoir, Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science, Watson describes his academic colleagues as "dinosaurs", "deadbeats", "fossils", "has-beens", "mediocre", and "vapid".[95] Steve Shapin in Harvard Magazine noted that Watson had written an unlikely "Book of Manners", telling about the skills needed at different times in a scientist's career; he wrote Watson was known for aggressively pursuing his own goals at the university. E. O. Wilson once described Watson as "the most unpleasant human being I had ever met", but in a later TV interview said that he considered them friends and their rivalry at Harvard "old history" (when they had competed for funding in their respective fields).[96][97]

In the epilogue to the memoir Avoid Boring People, Watson alternately attacks and defends former Harvard University president Lawrence Summers, who stepped down in 2006 due in part to his remarks about women and science.[98] Watson also states in the epilogue, "Anyone sincerely interested in understanding the imbalance in the representation of men and women in science must reasonably be prepared at least to consider the extent to which nature may figure, even with the clear evidence that nurture is strongly implicated."[67][95]

Public remarks on genetics, intelligence, and race

Genetic determinism controversies

At a conference in 2000, Watson suggested a link between skin color and sex drive, hypothesizing that dark-skinned people have stronger libidos.[65][99] His lecture argued that extracts of melanin—which gives skin its color—had been found to boost subjects' sex drive. "That's why you have Latin lovers", he said, according to people who attended the lecture. "You've never heard of an English lover. Only an English Patient."[100] Watson also said that stereotypes associated with racial and ethnic groups have a genetic basis: Jews being intelligent, Chinese being intelligent but not creative because of selection for conformity, and Indians being servile because of selection under caste endogamy.[101] Regarding intelligence differences between blacks and whites, Watson has asserted that "all our social policies are based on the fact that their (blacks) intelligence is the same as ours (whites) – whereas all the testing says not really ... people who have to deal with black employees find this not true."[102]

Watson repeatedly asserted that differences in average measured IQ between blacks and whites are due to genetics.[103][104][105] In early October 2007, he was interviewed by Charlotte Hunt-Grubbe at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL). Watson discussed his view that Africans are less intelligent than Westerners.[106][103][107] Watson said his intention was to promote science, not racism, but some UK venues canceled his appearances,[108] and Watson canceled the rest of his tour.[109][110][111][112] An editorial in Nature said that his remarks were "beyond the pale" but expressed a wish that the tour had not been canceled so that Watson would have had to face his critics in person, encouraging scientific discussion on the matter.[113] Because of the controversy, the board of trustees at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory suspended Watson's administrative responsibilities.[114] Watson issued an apology,[115] then retired at age 79 from CSHL from what the lab called "nearly 40 years of distinguished service".[59][116] Watson attributed his retirement to his age and to circumstances that he could never have anticipated or desired.[117][118][119]

In 2008, Watson was appointed chancellor emeritus of CSHL,[120][121] but continued to advise and guide project work at the laboratory.[122] In a BBC documentary that year, Watson said that he did not see himself as a racist.[123]

Scientific advocate of genetic determinism

In January 2019, following the broadcast of a television documentary made the previous year in which he repeated his views about race and genetics, CSHL revoked honorary titles that it had awarded to Watson and cut all remaining ties with him.[124][125][126] Watson did not respond to the developments.[127]

Criticism and legacy

Critics and elements of the general public have considered his scientific positions to be racist, sexist and unacceptable.[128][129] Writing for Time, Jeffery Kluger contrasts Watson's scientific legacy, giving rise to modern research and technology, with the legacy of his racist and sexist comments, and questions if the former can be lauded without endorsing the latter.[130] Writing about Watson's relationship to eugenics, legal historian Paul Lombardo said that his legacy is complex, having opposed state-sponsored programs of forced sterilization, only to be undermined by his own repeated allegations that racism was genetically justified.[131]

Personal life and death

Watson was an atheist.[6][132] In 2003, he was one of 22 Nobel Laureates who signed the Humanist Manifesto.[133] He wrote in Time that he contributed $1,000 to Bernie Sanders' 2016 presidential campaign.[4]

Watson and Elizabeth Lewis married in 1968.[1] They had two sons, Rufus Robert Watson (b. 1970) and Duncan James Watson (b. 1972). Watson sometimes talked about his son Rufus, who has schizophrenia, seeking to encourage progress in the understanding and treatment of mental illness by determining how genetics contributes to it.[122]

Watson died in East Northport, New York, on November 6, 2025, a week after being transferred to hospice care following treatment for an infection. He was 97.[57] After his death, The New York Times called Watson one of the most important scientists of the 20th century while also acknowledging the controversy behind his racial views.[57] The BBC noted that Watson's works "opened the door" to help explain how DNA replicates and carries genetic information while also "setting the stage for rapid advances in molecular biology".[134]

Awards and honors

Watson with the Othmer Gold Medal in 2005

Watson won numerous awards including:

Honorary degrees received

Professional and honorary affiliations

See also

References

  1.  "Watson, Prof. James Dewey". Who's Who. Vol. 2015 (online Oxford University Press ed.). A & C Black. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  2.  "James Watson, The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1962". NobelPrize.org. 1964. Retrieved June 12, 2013.
  3.  Randerson, James (October 25, 2007). "Watson retires". The Guardian. London. Retrieved December 12, 2007.
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  158.  "Brandeis University, Honorary Degree (10 June 1973), 1973". CSHL. Retrieved November 7, 2025.
  159.  "Albert Einstein College of Medicine Commencement Robe, 1974". CSHL. Retrieved November 7, 2025.
  160.  "Hofstra University, Honorary Degree (27 May 1976), 1976 - 1978". CSHL. Retrieved November 7, 2025.
  161.  "Harvard Commencement Ceremony". Wellcomecollection. Retrieved November 7, 2025.
  162.  "The Rockefeller University, Honorary Degree (11 June 1980), 1980". CSHL. Retrieved November 7, 2025.
  163.  "Rutgers University, Honorary Degree, 1988". CSHL. Retrieved November 7, 2025.
  164.  "JDW/2/2/132: Bard College (1991)". CSHL. Retrieved November 7, 2025.
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  167.  "University of Cambridge, Honorary Degree, 1993". CSHL. Retrieved November 7, 2025.
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Further reading

Library resources about
James Watson
By James Watson

Selected books published


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James D. Watson, Co-Discoverer of the Structure of DNA, Is Dead at 97

His decoding of the blueprint for life with Francis H.C. Crick made him one of the most important scientists of the 20th century. He wrote a celebrated memoir and later ignited an uproar with racist views.

Listen to this article · 24:11 min Learn more
A portrait of him in middle age sitting with one hand propped against his chin. A large painting of the double helix is on a wall behind him. He wears a blue sport jacket and red and white pinstriped shirt without a necktie.
Dr. James D. Watson in 1986. He and Francis H.C. Crick shared a Nobel Prize in 1962 for their work on DNA.Credit...NYPL/Science Source

By Cornelia Dean

Cornelia Dean, a science writer, was the science editor of The Times from 1997 to 2003.

James D. Watson, who entered the pantheon of science at age 25 when he joined in the discovery of the structure of DNA, one of the most momentous breakthroughs in the history of science, died on Thursday in East Northport, N.Y., on Long Island. He was 97.

His death, in a hospice, was confirmed on Friday by his son Duncan, who said Dr. Watson was transferred to the hospice from a hospital this week after being treated there for an infection.

Dr. Watson’s role in decoding DNA, the genetic blueprint for life, would have been enough to establish him as one of the most important scientists of the 20th century. But he cemented that fame by leading the ambitious Human Genome Project and writing perhaps the most celebrated memoir in science.

For decades a famous and famously cantankerous American man of science, Dr. Watson lived on the grounds of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, which, in another considerable accomplishment, he took over as director in 1968 and transformed from a relatively small establishment on Long Island with a troubled past into one of the world’s major centers of microbiology. He stepped down in 1993 and took a largely honorary position of chancellor.

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But his official career there ended ignominiously in 2007 after he ignited an uproar by suggesting, in an interview with The Sunday Times in London, that Black people, over all, were not as intelligent as white people. He repeated that assertion in on-camera interviews for a PBS documentary about him, part of the “American Masters” series. When the program aired in 2018, the lab, in response, revoked honorary titles that Dr. Watson had retained.

They were far from the first incendiary, off-the-cuff comments by a man who was once described as “the Caligula of biology,” and he repudiated them immediately. Nevertheless, though he continued his biological theorizing on subjects like the roles of oxidants and antioxidants in cancer and diabetes, Dr. Watson ceased to command the scientific spotlight.

He said later that he felt that his fellow scientists had abandoned him.

Dr. Watson’s tell-all memoir, “The Double Helix,” had also provoked his colleagues when it was published in 1968, infuriating them for, in their view, elevating himself while shortchanging others who were involved in the project. Still, it was instantly hailed as a classic of the literature of science. The Library of Congress listed it, along with “The Federalist Papers” and “The Grapes of Wrath,” as one of the 88 most important American literary works. (The list was later expanded to 100.)

But it was in discerning the double-helix physical structure of deoxyribonucleic acid, the chromosome-building molecule and medium of genetic inheritance, that won Dr. Watson and his co-discoverer, Francis H.C. Crick, enduring fame and the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962.

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In a black and white photo, two young men in jackets and ties walk in broad courtyard at the university. The large, stone King’s College Chapel is behind them.
Dr. Watson, right, and Francis H.C. Crick at the University of Cambridge in the 1950s. Credit...James D. Watson Collection/Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Archives, via Associated Press

In 1953, when Dr. Watson and Mr. Crick (as he was known then, before earning his Ph.D.) made their discovery, relatively little was known about DNA’s structure and action. Their work opened the door to the discovery of disease-causing genetic mutations, the design of genetically modified crops, the tantalizing and terrifying new gene-splicing technology of CRISPR Cas-9, and more.

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“It changed biology forever,” Bruce Stillman, who in 1994 took over from Dr. Watson as director of the Cold Spring Harbor lab, said in an interview for this obituary in 2018.

For Dr. Stillman, the discovery of DNA’s structure ranks with Darwin’s theory of evolution and Mendel’s laws of genetic inheritance. “The structure of DNA told us how inheritance occurs,” Dr. Stillman said, “but it also explained mutation and hence evolution.”

Dr. Watson came to fame in 1953, when biologists were concluding that DNA was at the center of genetic inheritance but could not say for sure what it looked like, how its information was stored, how that information was passed from generation to generation, or how it might control the actions of genes in cells.

In 1869, a Swiss biologist, Friedrich Miescher, had isolated a substance containing the DNA molecule — deoxyribonucleic acid — while studying the nucleus of white blood cells. He called the substance “nuclein” and theorized that it might have something to do with heredity.

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Dr. Miescher’s name “fell into obscurity,” as researchers put it in a 2008 article in the journal Nature Education, but by the turn of the 20th century, other biologists were building on his and other findings to elucidate the molecule’s chemical components — work that fueled the ideas of Dr. Watson and Mr. Crick.

Dr. Watson had in 1951 abandoned biochemistry work in Copenhagen and moved to the Cavendish Laboratory, part of the University of Cambridge in England; he said he was determined to work with researchers there who shared his fascination with DNA, which he considered the most important subject in biology.

There he encountered Mr. Crick, who, in his 30s, almost 12 years older than Dr. Watson, had resumed pursuing his war-interrupted Ph.D. His subject was ostensibly the protein structures of hemoglobin. In fact, he, too, was obsessed with DNA.

Working with X-ray images obtained by Rosalind E. Franklin and Maurice H.F. Wilkins, researchers at King’s College London, and after at least one humiliating false start, Dr. Watson and Mr. Crick eventually constructed a physical model of the molecule. The key came when Dr. Wilkins gave them access to certain images of Dr. Franklin’s, one of which, Photo 51, turned out to be the clue to the molecule’s structure. In what is widely — but not universally — regarded as a breach of research protocol, Dr. Wilkins provided the X-ray image to Dr. Watson and Mr. Crick without Dr. Franklin’s knowledge.

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Aided by that material, the two proposed that DNA was shaped like a kind of twisted ladder whose outside “rails” were formed of molecules of sugar and phosphate. Each of the ladder’s steps was formed of two of DNA’s four chemical bases — adenine, thymine, cytosine and guanine. Adenine always paired up with thymine, and guanine always paired up with cytosine.

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Enzymes within the cell could snip this twisted ladder down the middle and, using bases from within the cell, create two new DNA molecules from one.

Eager to beat their chief rival, the American chemist Linus C. Pauling of the California Institute of Technology, Dr. Watson and Mr. Crick wrote up their discovery and hustled it into the journal Nature. Though their paper was written in the typically flat tone of science and was barely a page long, it was clear that its authors had realized that they were onto something big.

Their proposed structure “has novel features which are of considerable biological interest,” they wrote, adding, “It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.”

In other words, they could explain how genetic instructions could move from one generation to the next.

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In white-tie formal wear, he appears to be shaking the hand of the king, whose back is to the camera, while holding his prize in the other hand.
Dr. Watson received his Nobel Prize from King Gustaf VI Adolf of Sweden in 1962.Credit...Scanpix Sweden, via Associated Press

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In 1962, Dr. Watson, Dr. Wilkins and now Dr. Crick won the Nobel Prize for the work. (Dr. Pauling, bested in the DNA race, won the 1962 Nobel Peace Prize for his opposition to weapons of mass destruction; he had won the prize in chemistry, in 1954, for his work on chemical bonds.)

If the Watson-Crick paper were published today, Dr. Franklin would almost certainly be listed as a co-author because of the importance of her work in the development of the double-helix structure, said Nancy Hopkins, a molecular biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who began working with Dr. Watson in the 1960s when she was an undergraduate at Harvard.

But Dr. Franklin could not have shared the Nobel when it was awarded in 1962. She died of ovarian cancer in 1958, at 37, and the prize is not given posthumously. (Nor is the prize ever shared by more than three people.)

Today, Dr. Franklin is a heroine for feminists in science, who note that, like most women at the time, she was underpaid, disrespected and often denigrated by male colleagues. Over the years, Dr. Watson played down her contribution, saying among other things that while her X-ray images were good, she did not realize what she had.

Expressing attitudes retrograde even by the standards of the 1960s, Dr. Watson famously described Dr. Franklin as a sexually repressed spinster and an unimaginative researcher. He and Dr. Wilkins called her “Rosy,” a nickname she did not use, but never to her face.

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Ironically, “Jim Watson’s memoir made Rosalind Franklin famous,” said Victor K. McElheny, a science writer whose biography, “Watson and DNA: Making a Scientific Revolution,” was published in 2003. Interviewed for this obituary in 2018, he said that Dr. Franklin and Dr. Wilkins had their own papers in the same issue of Nature as the Watson-Crick bombshell. (Mr. McElheny died in July.)

Dr. Wilkins, who continued researching DNA at King’s, died in 2004. Dr. Crick eventually moved to the Salk Institute in La Jolla, Calif., where he researched theoretical neurobiology and consciousness. He died in 2004 at 88.

Dr. Watson eventually moved from Cambridge, England, to Cambridge, Mass., where, in 1955, he accepted an appointment as assistant professor of biology at Harvard.

He was an inspiring teacher, Dr. Hopkins recalled, though he had a tendency to turn his back on his students and mumble into his blackboard. “He was so much fun to be around,” she said. “But he was easily bored, and if he was bored he would turn and walk away in the middle of a sentence.”

Dr. Watson was an astute talent-spotter among his undergraduate and graduate students, and he helped start notable research careers for more than a few of them, including women like Dr. Hopkins. Fascinated by a lecture he gave, she asked if she could work in his lab. He agreed, beginning an association that ripened into enduring friendship.

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She said he told her: “‘You should be a scientist. You have the kind of mind I have, and you are just as smart as I am.’”

Over the years, he advised her on her graduate studies, she said. “Every time I would get discouraged, I would go talk to him and he would say, ‘No, you have to keep going.’”

Dr. Watson “recognized talent and supported it,” Dr. Stillman said. And, he added, unlike many senior scientists, Dr. Watson did not insist on putting his name on the papers of his graduate students or postdoctoral researchers.

But Dr. Watson’s racist remarks had “overshadowed his support of women in science,” Dr. Stillman said.

Dr. Watson’s relations with the rest of the Harvard biology faculty were fraught. He offended his departmental colleagues by dismissing evolution, taxonomy, ecology and other biological research as “stamp collecting,” saying those fields must give way to the study of molecules and cells.

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“I found him the most unpleasant human being I had ever met,” one of his young colleagues, the evolutionary biologist E.O. Wilson, wrote in a 1994 memoir, “Naturalist.”

It was Dr. Wilson who maintained that Dr. Watson, having achieved fame with stunning work and at an early age, had become “the Caligula of biology.”

“He was given license to say anything that came to his mind and expect to be taken seriously,” Dr. Wilson wrote. “And unfortunately, he did so, with a casual and brutal offhandedness.”

Then and later, Dr. Watson declared proudly that he was just speaking his mind. He originally chose the title “Honest Jim” for the memoir that became “The Double Helix.”

The book, written in a breezy style, was a “beautifully brash” and “intensely personal” recounting of events leading up to one of the greatest discoveries of biology, the sociologist of science Robert K. Merton wrote on the cover of The New York Times Book Review.

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“I know of nothing quite like it in all the literature about scientists at work,” he wrote.

Dr. Crick’s initial reaction to the book was fury. He said Dr. Watson had focused on himself to the detriment of others involved in the project. (Dr. Hopkins said that the early versions of “The Double Helix” that Dr. Watson had given her to read “were a lot more outrageous than what was published.”)

Dr. Wilkins did not much like the book, either. He and Dr. Crick objected so strenuously that Harvard University Press dropped its plans to publish the work; it appeared instead in two installments in The Atlantic Monthly and was later published by Atheneum.

The book was a best seller. An annotated version came out in 2012, offering an even richer picture of the DNA triumph. And Dr. Crick eventually got over his anger.

At Harvard, Dr. Watson also wrote “Molecular Biology of the Gene,” his first in a series of notable textbooks. The book, now with co-authors in later editions, remains one of the most influential, widely used and admired texts in the history of biology.

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As a balding older man, he leans on a table beside a model of the double helix and smiles at the camera while wearing a pink shirt.
Dr. Watson in his office at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island in 1999.Credit...Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times

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Dr. Watson made his first visit to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, the establishment he would eventually restore to scientific prominence, in 1948. He attended meetings there with fellow researchers on the genetics of viruses that affect bacteria — bacteriophages, or phages — and over the next few years these summer meetings were repeated, attracting more researchers. Dr. Watson presented a paper there in 1953, just weeks after he and Dr. Crick had published their double helix finding.

But by 1968 when he was recruited to lead it, the lab, located in a onetime whaling port on the North Shore of Long Island, had faded from prominence. Dr. Watson more or less abandoned hands-on research to turn that situation around. With a knack for administration and fund-raising, he set the lab’s focus on microbiology aimed at understanding, diagnosing and treating the genetics of cancer. It was a prescient choice: In 1971, President Richard M. Nixon declared “war” on cancer. “And hence there was considerable funding,” Dr. Stillman said.

Dr. Watson also built up the lab’s educational offerings, established a graduate program, expanded its array of conferences and created a program for high school students studying DNA. That program is now “the largest high school laboratory program in genetics and biology in the world,” Dr. Stillman said last year.

And when researchers began to realize that it would be possible to decipher the entire sequence of genes in the human genome, Dr. Watson called them to a meeting at Cold Spring Harbor to discuss it. When the federal government established the Human Genome Project, it turned to Dr. Watson to be its first leader.

He recruited leading scientists and set the project’s agenda. For one thing, he proposed that it should first work on model organisms like the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans, on the theory that this research would pay dividends down the line. It did.

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He also said that the project should be an international project, with researchers from other countries, and that the American government effort should be run by the National Institutes of Health. And he insisted that 3 percent of its budget go to the study of the project’s social, moral and ethical implications. (That figure was later raised to 5 percent.)

A “working draft” was concluded in 2000 with a list of three billion letters in the human genetic code. It was hailed on June 26 in televised announcements by President Bill Clinton from the White House and Prime Minister Tony Blair at 10 Downing Street. Three years later, scientists announced the project officially over.

Dr. Watson had left the project in 1992 in a dispute over the patenting of genes, an idea that was backed by the Bush administration but was one that he despised. He was vindicated, in a way, in 2013, when the United States Supreme Court ruled that the discovery of a natural product, like a gene, did not warrant a patent — though the creation of new products from natural substances might.

“He was fundamentally opposed to the blueprint of life being patented,” Dr. Stillman said. “His view has held up.”

James Dewey Watson was born in Chicago on April 6, 1928, one of two children of James Dewey Watson, a debt collector for La Salle Extension University, a correspondence school based in Chicago, and the former Jean Mitchell, who worked in the University of Chicago admissions office and was active in Democratic Party politics.

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James grew up on the South Side of Chicago and attended South Shore High School. A precocious student, he was a contestant on the 1940s radio series “Quiz Kids,” broadcast from Chicago. At 15, he enrolled in the University of Chicago, and it was there that he encountered a book about biology, written for a lay audience by the quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger. The book, “What Is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell,” convinced the young Watson that genes were the key component of living cells.

After graduating in 1947, he went on to graduate school at Indiana University, where he encountered two giants in the field, Hermann J. Muller and Salvador E. Luria. (Dr. Muller won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1946, and Dr. Luria was similarly honored in 1969.)

Under Dr. Luria’s guidance, Dr. Watson received his doctorate in 1950. He then headed for Cambridge and fame.

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A black and white photo of the two young men, both in dark jackets, white shirts and ties, smiling and looking in different directions beside a large model of the double helix.
Dr. Watson, left, and Mr. Crick in the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge in 1953.Credit...Camera Press Pictures

Six-foot-two, gangly and perennially rumpled, Dr. Watson fit right in at the quarters he shared with Mr. Crick at the Cavendish Laboratory, an amenity-free premises known as “The Hut.” Decades later, his disheveled hair gray and thinning, he still walked with a lurching gait, often veering awkwardly off his path when someone or something attracted his attention.

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As a young man he bemoaned his single status and made no bones about the fact that he was in search of a wife. His search ended in 1968, when, about to turn 40, he married Elizabeth Lewis, a 19-year-old sophomore of Radcliffe College at Harvard. They had two sons, Rufus and Duncan. In a 2003 interview with The Guardian, Dr. Watson described Rufus’s severe mental illness, which he called a “genetic injustice.”

He often said that his son’s illness had been “a big incentive” for him to join the genome project.

His wife, an architectural preservationist, his sons and one grandson survive him.

Over the years Dr. Watson acquired a reputation for challenging scientific orthodoxy and for brash, unpleasant and even bigoted outspokenness. At one time or another he was quoted as disparaging gay men and women, girls who were not “pretty” and the intelligence and initiative generally of women, as well as of people with dark skin. At a lecture at Berkeley in 2000, he suggested a connection between exposure to sunlight and sex drive, saying it would explain why there are Latin lovers but not English lovers. And he once said that he felt bad whenever he interviewed an overweight job applicant because he knew he wasn’t going to hire someone who was fat.

Dr. Watson escaped serious consequences for his remarks until 2007, when he was traveling to promote his memoir “Avoid Boring People: Lessons From a Life in Science,” published that year. He was quoted in The Sunday Times as saying that while “there are many people of color who are very talented,” he was “inherently gloomy about the prospects of Africa.”

Social policies assume comparable intelligence levels, he went on, “whereas the testing says not really.”

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The remarks provoked widespread outrage, but they stung particularly at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, which early on had become known as a leader in eugenics, a theory supposedly aimed at improving the genetic quality of the human race through selective breeding. Today, eugenics is recognized as a racist enterprise that gave rise to, among other things, forced sterilization, restrictions on immigration and, in its ultimate horror in Nazi Germany, the Holocaust.

“Jim has made some very silly comments in his life,” Dr. Stillman said. “Perhaps those are the worst.”

Though Dr. Watson immediately apologized “unreservedly,” saying “there is no scientific basis for such a belief,” his remarks produced a swirl of denunciations and canceled speaking engagements. Within a week, he had resigned as chancellor of the laboratory.

In 2014, Dr. Watson put his Nobel medal up for auction at Christie’s, saying he would use the proceeds of the sale to provide for his family and support scientific research. But there was some speculation that the sale was a gesture of defiance directed at a scientific community that he felt had abandoned him.

A Russian billionaire, Alisher Usmanov, bought the medal for $4.1 million — and returned it to him.

In 2007, Dr. Watson became the second person to have his full genome sequenced. The first was J. Craig Venter, who as president of the Celera Corporation started a human genome sequencing project originally in competition with the government effort. Both men made their genomes available to researchers.

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Today, commercial concerns sell sequencing efforts to the public. And the double helix has entered popular culture. Its image has appeared on commercial products ranging from jewelry to perfume and on postage stamps issued by countries as various as Gabon and Monaco. Salvador Dalí incorporated the image in a painting, and the performance artists who make up Blue Man Group use the image in their shows.

It has also been reproduced in countless publications, often twisting the wrong way — an error so common that researchers have built web pages about it.

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Two men in dark suits and ties stand side by side and smiling at each other while together holding a thick white opened book.
Dr. Watson, left, and Mark Walport, director of the Wellcome Trust, a British research foundation, at the Wellcome Collection museum in 2007.Credit...Jonathan Player for The New York Times

Dr. Watson was once quoted as saying that he should be played in the movies by John McEnroe, the international bad boy of tennis, but when the BBC made a movie about Dr. Watson and Dr. Crick and the double helix, the American actor Jeff Goldblum played him as a tall, stooping and gum-chewing figure. (Dr. Crick and Dr. Franklin were played by the British actors Tim Pigott-Smith and Juliet Stevenson.) The movie, “Life Story” (also known in the United States as “The Race for the Double Helix” or “Double Helix”), first ran on television in 1987.

Dr. Watson leaves an enormous scientific legacy — his work on the structure of DNA; his inaugural leadership in the sequencing of the human genome, one of the biggest and most significant international scientific efforts ever completed; the researchers he encouraged; and his work at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, now a major global institution with a string of Nobel laureates among its faculty and associates. His books, especially “The Double Helix,” will no doubt be read as long as people study biology.

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When the sequencing of the genome was announced in 2000, President Clinton referred to the work as revealing God’s “book of life.” But Dr. Watson attributed his success as a researcher in part to his lack of religious belief. He once described himself as an “escapee” from the Roman Catholic faith.

“The luckiest thing that ever happened to me was that my father didn’t believe in God,” he told Discover magazine in an interview on the 50th anniversary of the publication of the double helix paper.

That was not to say he did not have faith. In his resignation statement in 2007, he referred to the “faith” in reason and social justice that he shared with his Scottish and Irish forebears, especially, he said, “the need for those on top to help care for the less fortunate.”

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