James Watson helped crack DNA's code, sparking medical advances and
ethical debates
[November 08, 2025]
By MALCOLM RITTER
On a foggy Saturday morning in 1953, a tall, skinny 24-year-old man
fiddled with shapes he had cut out of cardboard. They represented
fragments of a DNA molecule, and young James Watson was trying to figure
how they fit together in a way that let DNA do its job as the stuff of
genes.
Suddenly, he realized that they joined together to form the “rungs” of a
long, twisted ladder, a shape better known nowadays as a double helix.
His first reaction: “It’s so beautiful.”
But it was more than that. Discovering the structure of deoxyribonucleic
acid, or DNA, was a breakthrough that would help open the way to a
revolution in medicine, biology and other fields as diverse as
crime-fighting, genealogy and ethics.
Watson died Thursday, according to his former research lab. The
Chicago-born scientist was 97 years old. His career was marked by
significant achievements, including his role in mapping the human
genome. However, his legacy is complicated by controversial remarks on
race, which led to his condemnation and loss of honorary titles.
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 Bruce Stillman, president of
the Cold Spring Harbor lab, on Friday.
Watson shared the Nobel Prize with collaborator Francis Crick and
scientist Maurice Wilkins. They were 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
his book “The Double Helix,” and today she is considered a prominent
example of a female scientist whose contributions were overlooked.
Both of his Nobel co-winners, Crick and Wilkins, died in 2004. Franklin
died in 1958.
Their discovery instantly suggested how hereditary information is stored
and how a cell duplicates its DNA before dividing so that each resulting
cell inherits a copy. The duplication begins with the two strands of DNA
pulling apart like a zipper.
“Francis Crick and I made the discovery of the century, that was pretty
clear,” Watson once said. He also wrote: “There was no way we could have
foreseen the explosive impact of the double helix on science and
society.”
Among non-scientists, the double helix has become an instantly
recognized symbol of science. And for researchers, it 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.
That in turn has raised a host of ethical questions, such as whether we
should be altering a person’s genome in a way that is transmitted to
one’s offspring.
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.
[to top of second column]
|
President of the Russian Academy of Sciences Vladimir Fortov, right,
returns a Nobel prize medal which was sold at auction to a Russian
businessman, to U.S. Nobel laureate, biologist James Watson in the
Russian Academy of Sciences, in Moscow, Russia, Wednesday, June 17,
2015. (AP Photo/Ivan Sekretarev, File)
 Watson never made another lab
finding as big as the double helix. But in the decades that
followed, he wrote influential textbooks and a best-selling memoir,
picked out bright young scientists and helped them. And he used his
prestige and contacts to influence science policy.
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 molecular biology program, 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.
From 1988 to 1992, he 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.”
Yet 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 Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in
New York. He retired a week later. He had served in various
leadership jobs there for nearly 40 years.
“I only wish that Jim’s views on society and humanity could have
matched his brilliant scientific insights.” Dr. Francis Collins,
then-director of the National Institutes of Health, said in 2019.
In a television documentary that year, 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.”
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.
___
Ritter is a retired AP science writer. AP science writers Christina
Larson in Washington and Adithi Ramakrishnan in New York contributed
to this report.
All contents © copyright 2025 Associated Press. All rights reserved |
