Farewell to James Watson, Nobel Prize winner for the discovery of DNA: he was 97.

James Dewey Watson, the American biologist, biochemist, and geneticist who, along with Francis Crick, deciphered the double helix structure of DNA, one of the most important milestones in the history of science, has died at the age of 97. He died on Thursday, November 6, at a hospice on Long Island, New York. His son Duncan confirmed the news to the New York Times, explaining that Watson had been hospitalized for an infection and then transferred to palliative care.

The discovery, made in 1953, paved the way for modern genetics, biotechnology, and precision medicine. For this work, Watson and Crick shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Maurice Wilkins. Since then, the double helix has become a universal icon: the very symbol of life.

Watson's life, however, was not without its shadows. After directing and transforming the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory into one of the world's most prestigious research centers, he was forced to resign in 2007 following racist remarks made to the London Sunday Times, in which he questioned the intelligence of people of African descent. These comments provoked a wave of international outrage and the revocation of all honorary titles from the laboratory he had led for 25 years. "James said a lot of stupid things in his life. Those were the worst," commented Bruce Stillman, his successor at the helm of the research center, at the time.

Born in Chicago in 1928, the son of a tax collector and a university clerk, Watson displayed precocious intelligence: at 15, he was already in college. After earning his doctorate at Indiana University under the guidance of Nobel Prize winner Salvador Luria, he moved to Cambridge, where he met Francis Crick.

In 1953, thanks in part to unauthorized data from researcher Rosalind Franklin, the two managed to construct the model of the DNA double helix, revealing the mechanism by which genetic information is replicated from one generation to the next. That discovery, published in Nature, changed biology forever.

Watson recounted that feat in the famous book "The Double Helix," published in 1968: a brilliant and polemical memoir, which angered colleagues for its irreverent tone and Franklin's sexist descriptions. The book, however, became a classic of popular science and was included by the Library of Congress among the 100 most important American books of the 20th century.

After the Nobel Prize, Watson continued to exert enormous influence on contemporary science. In 1989, he became the first director of the Human Genome Project, the gigantic international undertaking that led, in 2000, to the complete mapping of human genes. "He was opposed to the idea that the 'book of life' could be patented," Stillman recalled. A position that the US Supreme Court upheld in 2013, ruling that naturally occurring genes cannot be patented.

Tall, lanky, and always a bit disheveled, Watson was described by colleagues and students as brilliant and difficult, capable of brilliant insights and disconcerting comments. Biologist E.O. Wilson called him "the Caligula of biology." In 2014, he auctioned off his Nobel Prize medal, declaring he felt "outcast" by the scientific community; it was purchased for over $4 million by Russian tycoon Alisher Usmanov, who later returned it to him.

Despite the controversies and setbacks, James Watson's name remains inextricably linked to the discovery of DNA, "the secret of life." A legacy no controversy can erase. (by Paolo Martini)