On a foggy Saturday morning in 1953, a tall, lean 24-year-old man was fiddling with shapes he had cut out of cardboard. They represented parts of the DNA molecule and young people James Watson He was trying to figure out how they fit together in a way that would allow DNA to do its job as the material of genes.
Suddenly, he realized that they had come together to form the “rungs” of a long, twisting staircase, a shape known today as a double helix.
His first reaction: “She’s so beautiful.”
But it was more than that. The discovery of the structure of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) was a major advance that would help open the way to revolutionize medicine, biology, and other fields as diverse as crime control, genealogy, and ethics.
Watson died Thursday, according to his former research laboratory. The Chicago-born scientist was 97 years old. His career was marked by major accomplishments, including his role in mapping the human genome. However, his legacy is complicated by controversial statements about race, which led to his conviction and loss of honorary titles.
The discovery of the double helix “is one of the three most important discoveries in the history of biology,” along with Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection and Gregor Mendel’s fundamental laws of genetics, Bruce Stillman, head of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, said Friday.
Watson shared the Nobel Prize with collaborator Francis Crick and scientist Maurice Wilkins. They were helped by X-ray research conducted by their colleague Rosalind Franklin and her graduate student Raymond Gosling. Watson was later criticized for her disparaging portrayal of Franklin in his book The Double Helix, and today she is considered a prominent example of a scientist whose contributions have been overlooked.
Both Nobel Prize winners, Crick and Wilkins, died in 2004. Franklin died in 1958.
Their discovery immediately suggested how genetic information is stored and how a cell replicates its DNA before dividing so that each resulting cell inherits a copy. The process of replication begins with the two strands of DNA being separated from each other like a zipper.
“Francis Crick and I made the discovery of the century, and it was very clear,” Watson once said. He also wrote: “We could not have predicted the double helix’s explosive impact on science and society.”
Among non-scientists, the double helix has become an instantly recognizable symbol of science. For researchers, it has helped open the door to newer developments such as… Tampering with genetic makeup of living organisms, Treatment of disease By inserting genes into patients, identifying human remains and criminal suspects DNA samples And tracking Family trees.
This in turn has raised a host of ethical questions, such as whether we should alter someone’s genome in a way that it is passed on to their 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 believed that knowing the full structure of DNA would be crucial to understanding this disease, and perhaps in time to help his son.
Watson never made another laboratory discovery the size of a double helix. But in the decades that followed, he wrote influential textbooks and best-selling memoirs, and picked up and helped bright young scholars. He used his prestige and connections to influence scientific policy.
After this 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 established the university’s molecular biology program, scientist Mark Ptashny recalled in a 1999 interview. Watson became director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 1968, its president in 1994, and its advisor 10 years later.
From 1988 to 1992, he directed federal efforts to determine the detailed structure of human DNA. He created the project’s huge investment in ethics research by simply announcing it at a press conference. He later said that this was “probably the wisest thing I’ve done over the past decade.”
However, he received unwelcome attention in 2007 when he was quoted in the Sunday Times Magazine in London as saying that he was “inherently gloomy about Africa’s prospects” because “all our social policies depend on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – which all tests suggest is not true.” While he hopes everyone is equal, “people who have to deal with black employees find that’s not true,” he said.
He apologized, but after an international uproar he was suspended from his job as a consultant for Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York. He retired a week later. He has served in various leadership capacities there for nearly 40 years.
“I only hope that Jim’s views on society and humanity have matched his brilliant scientific vision.” Dr. Francis Collins, then director of the National Institutes of Health, said in 2019.
In a television documentary that year, Watson was asked whether his views had changed. “No, not at all,” he said.
In response, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory rescinded several honorary titles it had bestowed on Watson, saying his statements were “reprehensible” and “not supported by science.”
His comments about race in 2007 were not the first time Watson had struck a chord with his comments. In a speech in 2000, he suggested that sexual drive is linked to skin color. He had previously told a newspaper that if the gene that regulates sexuality is found to be detectable in the womb, a woman who does not 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.
___
The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. AP is solely responsible for all content.