James Watson, one of the discoverers of DNA structure, received the Nobel Prize but later sold his medal

Of the famous quartet of scientists who discovered the double-helix structure of DNA, the last person has now died: biologist and Nobel laureate James Dewey Watson. According to The New York Times, the scientist died in a hospice, where he was taken this week after being treated for an infection in a hospital. He was 97.

After Watson was injured in 2018 when his car went off the road on Long Island and plunged down a 20-foot hill into a ditch, he was reportedly barely conscious. It was the beginning of an anticlimactic end to a life full of success and self-inflicted scandals.

As a child in Chicago, James Watson was particularly fond of birds and wanted to become an ornithologist. But he deviated from that idea after reading the lecture collection What is Life (1944) by physicist (and, we now realize, pedophile) Erwin Schrödinger. Schrödinger wrote that chromosomes must contain a kind of "code script" of a person's entire future development, although it wasn't yet clear how. This sparked Watson's interest in genetics. He went on to study zoology at the University of Chicago and earned his doctorate in 1950 from Indiana University for research on viruses in bacteria. He then left for Europe, where he met the three Britons of the double-helix quartet—although "quartet" might sound a bit too cheerful for their relationship.

Youthfully arrogant

Watson hit it off immediately in October 1951 with molecular biologist Francis Crick (1916-2004), who had been inspired by the same Schrödinger book. They were both youthfully arrogant and could not stand stupidity, Watson later wrote. At the Cavendish Lab at the University of Cambridge, the two shared a workspace so they wouldn't disturb others with their loud talk.

In May 1951, Watson had already met biophysicist Maurice Wilkins at a symposium in Naples. Wilkins (also 1916-2004, he died three months after Crick), who worked at King's College London, was a friend of Crick and was trying to decipher the structure of DNA using x-ray crystallography. X-rays are fired at molecules; the reflections reflected back from a photographic plate can be used to decipher the position of atoms in a molecule. The x-ray of DNA that Wilkins showed at the Naples symposium was the first Watson had ever seen.

The last of the four, Rosalind Franklin (1920-1958), was Wilkins' postdoctoral fellow, but the two didn't get along at all. In November 1951, Watson attended a seminar by Franklin, where she showed an X-ray of DNA in which she already saw a helical structure.

After that seminar, Watson and Crick presented their first DNA model, but they made such a blunder (if you think of a DNA molecule as a zipper, they had imagined the teeth on the outside in a way that is chemically highly improbable) that Cavendish lab head Lawrence Bragg pulled them off the subject. This was possible, because the structure of DNA wasn't actually their research topic. But because Bragg's archrival Linus Pauling also claimed to have nearly solved the structure of DNA, the competitive Watson and Crick were allowed to continue. By early 1953, they had reached a conclusion: on April 25, their article " Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid" appeared in the scientific journal Nature .

Wilkins and Franklin weren't co-authors, but their "unpublished experimental results and ideas" are cited as an influence. In his book The Double Helix (1968), Watson described how this happened. He had a falling out with Franklin, and afterward, Wilkins, unbeknownst to her, had shown him an X-ray of DNA she had taken: the now-famous photo 51 .

As late as 2023 , Nature was still discussing the extent to which Franklin had been duped by this and how crucial photo 51 had actually been for Watson and Crick. Perhaps other measurements (also Franklin's, incidentally) were more important. Perhaps she knew perfectly well that Watson and Crick had her data. In any case, she remained friendly with them until her death in 1958 from ovarian cancer (she was only 37).

She likely never knew that Watson and Crick attributed their discovery of the double helix to her data. She certainly couldn't share in the Nobel Prize that Crick, Watson, and Wilkins received for it in 1962, because Nobel Prizes aren't awarded posthumously (nor to more than three people simultaneously). And Franklin certainly never read how condescendingly Watson described her in The Double Helix : "Rosy" was a woman who needed to be put in her place. The book caused a stir; Wilkins also found it tasteless.

After publishing the double helix structure at 25, Watson felt somewhat lost. He returned to the US, first became a lecturer and then a professor at Harvard, continued birdwatching, and married Elizabeth Lewis, a student twenty years younger than him, the month before his fortieth birthday. They had two sons, Rufus (born 1970) and Duncan (born 1972).

In 1989, Watson became the first director of the Human Genome Project; he fervently hoped that mapping all human DNA could lead to new treatments for, for example, his eldest son's psychosis. But in 1992, he left after a row (he believed genes shouldn't be patentable). And today, the National Human Genome Research Institute's website features a disclaimer next to Watson's name, in which the institute distances itself from his "offensive and scientifically inaccurate remarks about race, nationality, homosexuality, gender, and other social issues."

Watson repeatedly made unashamedly sexist and racist remarks. In a 2007 interview in The Times, he claimed that black people are less intelligent than white people. At 79, he was forced to leave Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (Long Island, USA), which he had led since 1968.

Feeling marginalized by science, Watson auctioned off his gold Nobel medal in 2014. He donated a portion of the over $4 million raised to science and other charities (and received the medal back from the buyer). However, in a documentary released in early 2019, shortly after his car accident, he reiterated his assertion about race and IQ, adding that he believed the difference was genetic.

This is perhaps the irony of Watson's life: it is, in fact, thanks to him that Rosalind Franklin has gone down in history as an unsung genius and feminist icon, while he, of course, was the eccentric Nobel Prize winner, but will also be remembered as an archaic, narrow-minded lout.