DNA Pioneer James Watson Dies at 97

James Watson, who has died aged 97, was the 25-year-old American biologist who in 1953, with Francis Crick, revealed the double helix structure of DNA, the chemical of which genes are made; for this achievement both men won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1962.

Watson became almost as well known for The Double Helix, the book he wrote about their discovery, published in 1968. The Double Helix became an instant best-seller and caused a scandal for its scathing judgments of people whose identities were clear to the scientific world.

Watson’s portrayal of the crystallographer Rosalind Franklin (who had done much of the experimental work on which their discovery was based) as dour, dowdy and uncooperative spawned several books by other writers depicting her as a wronged woman – and Watson as a sexist monster and ambitious credit stealer.

In an epilogue to the book, published after Rosalind Franklin’s death from cancer in 1958, Watson admitted that his initial judgments about her had been wrong. But he was happy to leave the world with the impression that he had cracked the problem of the double helix in his spare time at Cambridge in between playing tennis and chasing “popsies” and au pairs.

James Dewey Watson was born in Chicago on April 6 1928. For an American he had an unusual upbringing, his parents being atheists, Left-wing and fairly poor. His father was a debt collector; his mother, who was of Scottish-Irish ancestry, once served as a Democratic precinct boss.

His father introduced Watson to bird watching, from which his love of biology developed. His mother debated great issues, such as heredity versus the environment, though intriguingly it was young James who championed the side of the environment as the more important factor shaping people’s lives. Unlike his colleague Francis Crick, he remained cautious about biological determinism – “You can also change someone’s fate if you pay off their credit card,” he liked to say.

At school he was an unpopular child. His fondness for speaking his mind coupled with his precocious intellect made him enemies, so he preferred the company of adults. He entered Chicago University at the young age of 15, then took a doctorate – on viruses – at Indiana University, working under Salvador Luria.

He began further research at Copenhagen, but became bored with his studies. Instead, he became interested in the emerging field of genetics, about which he knew nothing at all. He had heard that Cambridge scientists were working on the structure of proteins, so in 1951, aged 23, he arrived in the city hoping to discover what genes were, and thinking that solving the structure of DNA might help.

He was greeted at the station by Max Perutz, the head of a team at the Cavendish laboratory studying the structure of proteins using X-ray diffraction. On their way to Watson’s digs, Perutz took him along the backs and through Trinity Great Court. “I had never seen such beautiful buildings in my life,” Watson recalled, “and any hesitation I had had about leaving my safe life as a biologist vanished.”

One of Perutz’s team was the physicist turned molecular biologist Francis Crick, a bombastic man 12 years Watson’s senior, famed for his booming laugh and accident-prone experiments. Crick recalled learning about Watson’s arrival from his wife: “Max was here with a young American he wants you to meet and, you know what, he had no hair!”

Sporting a crew-cut, then a novelty in Cambridge, Watson met Crick soon after. “Jim and I hit it off immediately,” Crick recalled, “partly because our interests were astonishingly similar and partly, I suspect, because a certain youthful arrogance, a ruthlessness and an impatience with sloppy thinking came naturally to both of us.”

Max Perutz said of the pair that “they shared the sublime arrogance of men who had never met their intellectual equals”. But he noted their contrasting styles. Whereas Crick was tall, fair, dandyishly dressed and loud, Watson “went round like a tramp, making a show of never cleaning his shoes, and spoke in a low nasal monotone that faded before the end of each sentence, to be followed by a snort.”

“To say that neither suffered fools gladly,” Perutz added, “was an understatement. Crick was vicious at pouncing on non sequiturs and Watson would demonstratively unfold his newspaper at lectures which bored him.”

Watson did not attempt to make himself popular. The French geneticist François Jacob recalled his quirky and arrogant manner: “Tall, gawky, scraggly, he had an inimitable style. Inimitable in his dress: shirt tails flying, knees in the air, socks down to his ankles. Inimitable in his bewildering manner, his mannerisms: his eyes always bulging. His mouth always open. He uttered short choppy sentences punctuated by ‘ah, ah!’ Inimitable also in his way of entering a room, cocking his head like a rooster looking for the finest hen, to locate the most important scientist present and charging over to his side.”

Crick and Watson dropped everything to concentrate on solving the problem of the structure of DNA. It had already been established that DNA carries genetic information from one generation to the next, but its structure and the mechanism by which such information is passed on to the next generation remained the single greatest unanswered question in biology.

DNA was “up for grabs” and Crick and Watson were determined to make the break-through before anyone else. They concluded that the quickest way was not by experimentation or complicated mathematics but by guesswork, building models and attempting to assemble the information like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.

They were shameless in muscling in on the experiments of others, such as Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin of King’s College, London, who had been taking photographs of X-rays bounced off DNA crystals – photographs that were to give Crick and Watson the vital clues they needed. Watson even hinted in his book that he tried to marry off his sister to Wilkins in an attempt to get him to reveal his research results.

Watson and Rosalind Franklin did not hit it off. He found her humourless and unattractive. “Momentarily I wondered how she would look if she took off her glasses and did something novel with her hair,” he wrote in The Double Helix. She was clearly irritated by his arrogance and his apparently flippant attitude to her research. “The thought could not be avoided,” Watson concluded, “that the best place for a feminist was in another person’s lab.”

At first they floundered, but finally in 1953, they succeeded in constructing a three-dimensional model consistent with the evidence. It was Watson who made the crucial breakthrough, playing around with cardboard shapes that represented the known properties of the four chemical bases of DNA: “by the time I had cycled back to college and climbed over the gate, I had decided to build two-chain models. Francis would have to agree. Even though he was a physicist, he knew that important biological objects come in pairs.”

The model consisted of two helical chains of DNA coiled around the same axis to form a right-handed double helix. Crick gave Watson the credit: “In a sense Jim’s discovery was luck, but then most discoveries have an element of luck in them. The most important point is that Jim was looking for something signifiant and immediately recognised the significance of the correct pairs when he hit upon them by chance.”

That evening, according to Watson’s account, Crick strode into The Eagle, a City centre pub, and announced to the assembled crowd that they had “discovered the secret of life”.

The discovery took the scientific world by storm. When Watson gave a lecture to an audience of American academics later that year he found that no one uttered a word of criticism. “This structure was of such simplicity, such perfection, such harmony, such beauty even, and biological advantages flowed from it with such rigour and clarity, that one could not believe it untrue.”

In the famous opening sentence of their paper published in Nature on April 25 1953, Crick and Watson announced: “We wish to suggest a structure for the salt of deoxyribose nucleic acid (DNA). This structure has novel features which are of considerable biological interest.”

DNA, they revealed, consists of a double helix of sugar-phosphate molecules cross-linked by nucleic acids. If the two spirals were separated, each would serve as a template for the formation of a sister strand identical to its former partner, a neat explanation for what happens in cell division. Moreover, they believed that the order of bases along the molecule formed a “code” that was translated by the cell into a specific protein.

Their achievement transformed our understanding of biology yet their paper made only an oblique reference to the obvious implications of their findings for genetic research because Watson had an uncharacteristic loss of nerve, fearing that they might have got it wrong and he would be made to look an ass.

After 1953, the two men’s paths diverged. Crick continued to work in Cambridge as a research scientist. Watson left for the California Institute of Technology, moving on two years later to Harvard, where he became Professor of Molecular Biology in 1961.

In 1968 he abandoned his own research work to become director of the Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory, a research institute based in a converted warehouse overlooking the picturesque Long Island estuary. Over the next 20 years, he transformed the laboratory into a first-rate centre for molecular genetic research, acquiring a reputation as a skilled administrator with a gift for finding the best people and encouraging their creativity.

Watson was the natural candidate to head the American National Institute of Health’s (NIH) Human Genome Project, a multi-million dollar research programme established in 1989 to analyse every one of the 50,000 to 100,000 genes within human DNA.

But his blunt manner of saying exactly what he thought soon landed him in trouble and in 1992 he resigned following reports that the director of the NIH had ordered an investigation into possible conflicts of interest due to Watson’s shareholdings in biotech companies. But there were many who saw the inquiry as a pretext for unseating Watson who had clashed with the NIH the previous year over plans to patent human genes.

Watson had retained much of the English liberal academic ethos and kept a flat in London. When in 1991 the NIH disclosed, without telling him, that it was proposing to patent all the human gene sequences which it had identified as being active in the human brain, Watson’s reaction was scathing. Patenting genes, he claimed, would disrupt relations with other countries that he had built up.

Watson returned to the Cold Spring Habour Laboratory where he became president in 1994. From there he continued to defend the benefits of genetic research and took the lead in international debate about the ethical issues involved.

He blamed the Left for scare stories about genetically modified foods: “they were against Nixon, they were against Dow chemicals, the were against napalm, they were against pollution. So DNA was going to be another polluter. When people can’t give any numbers to a fear then you shouldn’t take it into account.”

He was equally scathing about the Prince of Wales’s opposition to GM foods: “Your crown prince can afford to be a Luddite. He doesn’t have to be efficient. He’s a rich farmer. You have to think of farmers who might suddenly go out of business because someone else can do it cheaper.”

He was confident of the benefits of genetic screening. Though one of his own sons was born with a severe learning disability he argued that “we already accept that most couples don’t want a Downs child. You would have to be crazy to say you wanted one because that child has no future. So to tell a woman she has to look after a Downs baby is like these priests who tell women what to do. Well they don’t have to deal with the reality of it.”

On another occasion he suggested that “if you could find the gene which determines sexuality and a woman decides she doesn’t want a homosexual child, well let her”.

The greatest evil was government intervention: “These things should be kept away from people who think they know best – committees of rabbis and priests saying ‘we know what’s good for you’.”

Watson wrote a number of books about DNA and molecular biology, including A Passion for DNA (2000). In 2007, while promoting his memoir Avoid Boring People, he made remarks about the intellectual inferiority of black Africans during an interview with The Sunday Times, and in the ensuing furore was forced to resign his position at Cold Spring Harbour.

Thereafter he claimed to have become persona non grata within the scientific Establishment. In 2014 he had his Nobel medal auctioned at Christie’s to fund his own research.

James Watson married, in 1968, Elizabeth Lewis, his laboratory assistant. She survives him with their two sons.