Linus Pauling<\/a> stole a march on them when he announced he had the answer: DNA was a triple helix, with the bases sticking out, like charms on a bracelet.<\/p>\nWatson and Crick were devastated, until they realized Pauling\u2019s scheme would not work. After seeing an X-ray image of DNA taken by crystallographer Rosalind Franklin, they built a 6-foot-tall metal model of a double helix, shaped like a spiral staircase, with the rungs made of the bases adenine and thymine, guanine and cytosine. When they finished, it was immediately apparent how DNA copies itself, by unzipping down the middle, allowing each chain to find a new partner. In Watson\u2019s words, the final product was \u201ctoo pretty\u201d not to be true.<\/p>\n
![\"Dr.](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/1762600276_435_\")
<\/p>\n
American biology professor James Dewey Watson from Cambridge, Nobel laureate in medicine in 1962, explains the possibilities of future cancer treatments at a Nobel Laureate Meeting in Lindau on July 4, 1967. Watson had received the Nobel Prize together with the two British scientists Crick and Wilkins for their research on the molecular structure of nucleic acids (DNA).<\/p>\n
(Gerhard Rauchwetter \/ picture alliance via Getty Images)<\/p>\n
It was true, and in 1962, Watson, Crick and another researcher, Maurice Wilkins, were awarded the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine. Franklin, whose expert X-ray images solidified Watson\u2019s conviction that DNA was a double helix, had died four years earlier of ovarian cancer. Had she lived, it\u2019s unclear what would have happened, since Nobel rules allow only three people to share a single prize.<\/p>\n
In the coming years, Watson\u2019s attitude toward Franklin became a matter of controversy, which he did little to soothe by his unchivalrous treatment of her in his 1968 book, \u201cThe Double Helix.\u201d \u201cBy choice, she did not emphasize her feminine qualities,\u201d he wrote, adding that she was secretive and quarrelsome.<\/p>\n
To his admirers, this was just \u201cHonest Jim,\u201d as some referred to him, being himself, a refreshing antidote to the increasingly politically correct world of science and society. But as the years passed, more controversies erupted around his \u201ctruth-telling\u201d \u2014 he said he would not hire an overweight person because they were not ambitious, and that exposure to the sun in equatorial regions increases sexual urges \u2014 culminating with remarks in 2007 that he could not escape. He said he was \u201cinherently gloomy\u201d about Africa\u2019s prospects because policies in the West were based on assumptions that the intelligence of Black people is the same as Europeans, when \u201call the testing says, not really.\u201d<\/p>\n
He apologized \u201cunreservedly,\u201d but was still forced to retire as chancellor of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, the Long Island, N.Y., institution he had rescued from the brink of insolvency decades earlier. Afterward, he complained about being reduced to a \u201cnon-person,\u201d but rekindled public outrage seven years later by insisting in a documentary that his views had not changed. This time, citing his \u201cunsubstantiated and reckless personal opinions,\u201d the laboratory rescinded the honorary titles it had bestowed, chancellor emeritus and honorary trustee.<\/p>\n
Mark Mannucci, director of the documentary \u201cAmerican Masters: Decoding Watson,\u201d compared him to King Lear, a man \u201cat the height of his powers and, through his own character flaws, was brought down.\u201d Those sympathetic to Watson said the problem was he didn\u2019t know any of his Black colleagues. If he had, they argued, he would have immediately renounced his prejudices.<\/p>\n
Following his DNA triumph, Watson spent two years at Caltech before joining the faculty at Harvard University. During this period, he worked to understand the role ribonucleic acid (RNA) plays in the synthesis of proteins that make bodily structures. If the double-stranded DNA contains the body\u2019s master plan, the single-stranded RNA is the messenger, telling the cell\u2019s protein factories how to build the three-dimensional shapes that make the whole. Watson\u2019s 1965 textbook, \u201cMolecular Biology of the Gene,\u201d became a foundation stone of modern biology.<\/p>\n
As great as was his obsession with DNA, Watson\u2019s pursuit of, and failure to obtain, female companionship was a matter of only marginally less critical mass. At Harvard, he recruited Radcliffe coeds to work in his lab, reasoning that \u201cif you have pretty girls in the lab, you don\u2019t have to go out.\u201d He started attending Radcliffe parties known as jolly-ups. \u201cHere comes this 35-year-old and he wants to come to jolly-ups,\u201d said a biographer, Victor McElheny. \u201cHe was constantly swinging and missing.\u201d<\/p>\n
His batting average improved when he met Elizabeth Vickery Lewis, a 19-year-old Radcliffe sophomore working in the Harvard lab. He married her in 1968, realizing by only days his goal of marrying before 40. On his honeymoon, he sent a postcard back to Harvard: \u201cShe\u2019s 19; she\u2019s beautiful; and she\u2019s all mine.\u201d The couple had two sons, Rufus, who developed schizophrenia in his teens, and Duncan.<\/p>\n
The same year, Watson finished writing \u201cThe Double Helix.\u201d When he showed it to Crick and Wilkins, both objected to the way he characterized them and persuaded Harvard not to publish it. Watson soon found another publisher.<\/p>\n
It was certainly true his book could be unkind and gossipy, but that was why the public, which likely had trouble sorting out the details of crystallography and hydrogen bonds, loved it. \u201cThe Double Helix\u201d became an international bestseller that remained in stock for many years. Eventually, Watson and Crick made up and by the time the Englishman died in 2004, they were again the boon pals they\u2019d been 50 years earlier.<\/p>\n
After their discovery of DNA\u2019s structure, the two men took divergent paths. Crick hoped to find the biological roots of consciousness, while Watson devoted himself to discovering a cure for cancer.<\/p>\n
After serving on a voluntary basis, Watson became director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island in 1976. It had once been a whaling village, and the humble buildings retained a rustic charm, though when Watson arrived the rustic quality was on a steep descent toward ruination. Its endowment was virtually nonexistent and money was so tight a former director mowed the lawn himself.<\/p>\n
As skilled at raising money as he was at solving difficult scientific problems, Watson turned the institution into a major research center that helped reveal the role of genetics in cancer. By 2019, the endowment had grown to $670 million, and the research staff had tripled. From an annual budget of $1 million, it had grown to $190 million.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou have to like people who have money,\u201d Watson said in explanation of his success at resurrecting Cold Spring Harbor. \u201cI really like rich people.\u201d His growing eccentricity, which included untied shoelaces and hair that spiked out in all directions, completed the stock image of a distracted scientist. Acquaintances swore they saw him untie his shoelaces before meeting with a potential donor.<\/p>\n
In 1988, he became the first director of the $3-billion Human Genome Project, whose goal was to identify and map every human gene. He resigned four years later, after a public falling-out with the director of the National Institutes of Health. \u201cI completely failed the test,\u201d he said of his experience as a bureaucrat.<\/p>\n
Among his passions were tennis and charity work. In 2014, the year of the documentary that sealed his fate as an exile, Watson put his Nobel gold medal up for auction. He gave away virtually all the $4.1 million it fetched. The buyer, Russian billionaire Alisher Usmanov, returned it a year later, saying he felt bad the scientist had to sell possessions to support worthy causes.<\/p>\n
A complex, beguiling, maddening man who defied easy, or any, categorization, Watson followed his own star to the end of his life, insisting in 2016, when he was nearly 90, that he didn\u2019t want to die until a cure for cancer was found. At the time, he was still playing tennis three times a week, with partners decades younger.<\/p>\n
Besides the Nobel Prize, Watson was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Eli Lilly Award in Biochemistry and the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, and was made an honorary Knight of the British Empire. Among his literary works were both scientific and popular books, from \u201cRecombinant DNA\u201d to \u201cGenes, Girls, and Gamow,\u201d a typically cheeky book recounting his twin obsessions, scientific glory and the opposite sex.<\/p>\n
Johnson is a former Times staff writer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On a chilly February afternoon in 1953, a gangly American and a fast-talking Brit walked into the Eagle…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":44065,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[4118,29215,29217,29216,29221,29220,48,52,51,1637,47,50,49,29218,20869,29219,7756,7814,29214,29222,72],"class_list":["post-44064","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-basis","tag-dna","tag-double-helix","tag-francis-crick","tag-harvard","tag-james-watson","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-life","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news","tag-nobel-prize-winner","tag-protein","tag-small-book","tag-son","tag-structure","tag-watson","tag-x-ray-image","tag-year"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44064","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44064"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44064\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44065"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44064"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44064"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44064"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}