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, New York, on Long Island. He was 97.
His death, in a hospice, was confirmed on Friday by his son Duncan, who said Watson was transferred to the hospice from a hospital this week after being treated there for an infection.
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, Watson lived on the grounds of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, which he took over as director in 1968 and transformed from a relatively small establishment on Long Island into one of the world’s major centres of microbiology. He stepped down in 1993 and took a largely honorary position of chancellor.
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 programme aired in 2018, the lab, in response, revoked honorary titles that Watson had retained.
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.
But it was in discerning the double-helix physical structure of deoxyribonucleic acid, the chromosome-building molecule and medium of genetic inheritance, that won Watson and his co-discoverer, Francis H.C. Crick, enduring fame and the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962.