Overview
- Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory said he died Thursday at a Long Island hospice at age 97.
- With Francis Crick, he described the DNA double helix in a seminal 1953 paper informed by Maurice Wilkins’s groundwork.
- He shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Crick and Wilkins for uncovering DNA’s structure.
- Racist remarks in 2007 prompted his resignation from leadership at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, and after repeating such comments he lost remaining ties to the institution.
- In 2014 he sold his Nobel medal, which a wealthy Russian buyer purchased and then returned to him.