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28m ago

James D. Watson, Co-Discoverer of DNA’s Double Helix, Dies at 97

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory confirmed the death of a DNA pioneer whose renown was later clouded by formal censure over remarks on race.

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FILE - U.S. biologist James Watson, who shared a Nobel prize for helping discover the double-helix shape of the DNA molecule, poses for a portrait at an exhibition in Berlin on Monday, Oct. 11, 2004. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber, File)
James D. Watson, co-discoverer of the DNA helix and father of the Human Genome Project, stands inside a laboratory at the Baylor College of Medicine's Human Genome Sequencing Center in Houston May 31, 2007. REUTERS/Richard Carson (UNITED STATES)/File Photo
FILE - U.S. Nobel laureate, biologist James Watson speaks at the Russian Academy of Sciences, in Moscow, Russia, Wednesday, June 17, 2015. (AP Photo/Ivan Sekretarev, File)

Overview

  • Watson died Thursday on Long Island at age 97, with his son telling the New York Times he passed in hospice after a hospital stay for an infection.
  • He and Francis Crick proposed the double‑helix structure of DNA in 1953 and shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Maurice Wilkins, drawing on X‑ray data produced by Rosalind Franklin.
  • A longtime leader of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, he helped establish the Human Genome Project and left its directorship after opposing efforts to patent gene sequences.
  • Controversial public statements on race led to a negotiated retirement from CSHL in 2007 and loss of honorary titles after similar comments in 2019.
  • He was among the first individuals to have his entire genome sequenced in 2007 and made the data public while declining to learn his Alzheimer’s‑risk status.