Overview
- Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory confirmed his death, with family accounts to news outlets placing it on November 6 after a hospital transfer for an infection.
- Watson and Francis Crick proposed the double‑helix model in a 1953 Nature paper, and he shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Crick and Maurice Wilkins.
- Rosalind Franklin’s X‑ray diffraction images were pivotal to deducing the structure, a contribution historians note was not properly credited at the time.
- He directed Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory from 1968 to 1993 and later played roles in early human genome initiatives and scientific publishing and education.
- From 2007, he faced broad censure for racist and other offensive statements, was marginalized professionally, and in 2014 sold his Nobel medal, which was returned in 2015.