Overview
- Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and his son Rufus confirmed he died on Nov. 6 at age 97, and the New York Times reported he died this week in a Long Island hospice.
- He and Francis Crick described the DNA double-helix in a 1953 Nature paper, work that led to the 1962 Nobel Prize shared with Maurice Wilkins.
- The breakthrough drew on Rosalind Franklin’s X-ray data, a crucial contribution that was not publicly credited at the time.
- Watson directed Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory from 1968 to 1993 and later led a U.S. national center for the Human Genome Project, after a Harvard professorship.
- His reputation eroded after widely condemned racist remarks beginning in 2007, and he later auctioned his Nobel medal in 2014 before the buyer returned it in 2015.