James Watson helped crack DNA’s code, sparking medical advances and ethical debates
On a foggy Saturday morning in 1953, a tall, skinny 24-year-old man was playing with shapes he had cut out of cardboard. They represented fragments of a DNA molecule, and young James Watson was trying to understand how they fit together in a way that allowed the DNA to do its job as a genetic substance.
Suddenly he realized that they were joining together to form the “rungs” of a long twisted ladder, a shape better known today as a double helix.
His first reaction: “It’s so beautiful. »
But it was more than that. The discovery of the structure of deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, was a major breakthrough that would pave the way for a revolution in medicine, biology and other fields as diverse as crime fighting, genealogy and ethics.
Watson died Thursday, according to his former research laboratory. The Chicago-born scientist was 97 years old. His career was marked by significant achievements, including his role in mapping the human genome. However, his legacy is complicated by controversial remarks about race, which led to his conviction and loss of his honorary titles.
The discovery of the double helix “is considered one of the three most important discoveries in the history of biology,” alongside Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection and Gregor Mendel’s fundamental laws of genetics, Bruce Stillman, president of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, said Friday.
Watson shared the Nobel Prize with his collaborator Francis Crick and scientist Maurice Wilkins. They were aided by the X-ray research carried out by their colleague Rosalind Franklin and her graduate student Raymond Gosling. Watson was later criticized for her disparaging portrayal of Franklin in her book “The Double Helix,” and she is today considered a prominent example of a female scientist whose contributions have been overlooked.
His two co-Nobel Prize winners, Crick and Wilkins, died in 2004. Franklin died in 1958.
Their discovery immediately suggested how hereditary information is stored and how a cell duplicates its DNA before dividing, so that each resulting cell inherits one copy. Duplication begins when the two strands of DNA separate like a zipper.
“Francis Crick and I made the discovery of the century, it was pretty clear,” Watson said. He also wrote: “We could never have predicted the explosive impact of the double helix on science and society. »
Among non-scientists, the double helix became an immediately recognized symbol of science. And for researchers, it helped open the door to more recent developments such as changing the genetic makeup of living things, treating diseases by inserting genes into patients, identifying human remains and criminal suspects from DNA samples, and tracing family trees.
This has raised a host of ethical questions, such as whether we should edit a person’s genome in such a way that it will be passed on to their offspring.
Watson’s initial motivation for supporting the genetics project was personal: his son Rufus had been hospitalized with a possible diagnosis of schizophrenia, and Watson believed that knowing the full composition of DNA would be crucial to understanding this illness, perhaps in time to help his son.
Watson never made a laboratory discovery as important as the double helix. But in the decades that followed, he wrote influential textbooks and a best-selling memoir, selected brilliant young scientists and helped them. And he used his prestige and contacts to influence science policy.
Following that discovery, Watson spent two years at the California Institute of Technology, then joined the Harvard faculty in 1955. Before leaving Harvard in 1976, he essentially created the university’s molecular biology program, scientist Mark Ptashne recalled in a 1999 interview. Watson became director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 1968, president in 1994, and chancellor 10 years later.
From 1988 to 1992, he led the federal effort to identify the detailed composition of human DNA. He created the project’s huge investment in ethics research by simply announcing it at a press conference. He later said it was “probably the wisest thing I’ve done in the last decade.”
Yet he attracted unwanted attention in 2007 when London’s Sunday Times Magazine quoted him as saying he was “inherently gloomy about Africa’s prospects” because “all our social policies are based on their intelligence being the same as ours – when all the tests say that’s not really the case”. He said that while he hoped everyone was equal, “people who have to deal with black employees find out that’s not true.”
He apologized, but after an international furore, he was suspended as chancellor of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York. He retired a week later. He held various management positions there for almost 40 years.
“I only wish that Jim’s views on society and humanity could have matched his brilliant scientific knowledge.” Dr. Francis Collins, then director of the National Institutes of Health, said in 2019.
In a television documentary that year, Watson was asked if his views had changed. “No, not at all,” he replied.
In response, the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory revoked several honorifics it had given to Watson, saying his statements were “reprehensible” and “unsupported by science.”
His 2007 remarks on race were not the first time Watson struck a chord with his comments. In a speech in 2000, he suggested that libido was linked to skin color. And earlier, he told a newspaper that if a gene governing sexuality was discovered and could be detected in the uterus, a woman who does not want to have a gay child should be allowed to have an abortion.
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Ritter is a retired AP science writer. AP Science Writers Christina Larson in Washington and Adithi Ramakrishnan in New York contributed to this report.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
