James Watson, who helped unravel DNA’s double-helix, has died

James Dewey Watson, who helped reveal the double helix structure of DNA, launched the Human Genome Project and became infamous for his racist, sexist and otherwise offensive statements, has died. He was 97 years old.

His death was confirmed to the New York Times by his son Duncan, who said Watson died Thursday at a hospice in East Northport, New York, on Long Island. He had previously been hospitalized for an infection. The Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory also confirmed his death.

Watson was born in Chicago in 1928 and gained scientific fame in 1953, at the age of 25, for solving the molecular structure of DNA – the genetic models of life – with his colleague Francis Crick of the Cavendish Laboratory in England. Their discovery relied largely on the work of chemist and crystallographer Rosalind Franklin of King’s College London, whose X-ray images of DNA provided essential clues to the molecule’s twisted ladder-like architecture. One image in particular from Franklin’s laboratory, Photo 51, made Watson and Crick’s discovery possible. But his contribution has not been fully recognized. The image was given to Watson and Crick without Franklin’s knowledge or consent by Maurice Wilkins, a biophysicist and Franklin’s colleague.

Watson, Crick and Wilkins were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962 for their discovery of the structure of DNA. By this time, Franklin had passed away (she died in 1958 at the age of 37 from ovarian cancer) and Nobel Prizes are not awarded posthumously. But Watson and Crick’s treatment of Franklin and his research sparked lasting contempt within the scientific community. Throughout his career and in his memoirs, Watson disparaged Franklin’s intelligence and appearance.