James D. Watson, who entered the pantheon of science at age 25 when he joined in the discovery of the structure of DNA, one of the most momentous breakthroughs in the history of science, died on Thursday in East Northport, N.Y., on Long Island. He was 97.
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Dr. Watson’s role in decoding DNA, the genetic blueprint for life, would have been enough to establish him as one of the most important scientists of the 20th century. But he cemented that fame by leading the ambitious Human Genome Project and writing perhaps the most celebrated memoir in science.
For decades a famous and famously cantankerous American man of science, Dr. Watson lived on the grounds of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, which, in another considerable accomplishment, he took over as director in 1968 and transformed from a relatively small establishment on Long Island with a troubled past into one of the world’s major centers of microbiology. He stepped down in 1993 and took a largely honorary position of chancellor.
But his official career there ended ignominiously in 2007 after he ignited an uproar by suggesting, in an interview with The Sunday Times in London, that Black people, over all, were not as intelligent as white people. He repeated the assertion in on-camera interviews for a PBS documentary about him, part of the “American Masters” series. When the program aired in 2018, the lab, in response, revoked honorary titles that Dr. Watson had retained.
They were far from the first incendiary, off-the-cuff comments by a man who was once described as “the Caligula of biology,” and he repudiated them immediately. Nevertheless, though he continued his biological theorizing on subjects like the roles of oxidants and antioxidants in cancer and diabetes, Dr. Watson ceased to command the scientific spotlight.
He said later that he felt that his fellow scientists had abandoned him.
Dr. Watson’s tell-all memoir, “The Double Helix,” had also provoked his colleagues when it was published in 1968, infuriating them for, in their view, elevating himself while shortchanging others who were involved in the project. Still, it was instantly hailed as a classic of the literature of science. The Library of Congress listed it, along with “The Federalist Papers” and “The Grapes of Wrath,” as one of the 88 most important American literary works. (The list was later expanded to 100.)
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Working with X-ray images obtained by Rosalind E. Franklin and Maurice H.F. Wilkins, researchers at King’s College London, and after at least one humiliating false start, Dr. Watson and Mr. Crick eventually constructed a physical model of the molecule. The key came when Dr. Wilkins gave them access to certain images of Dr. Franklin’s, one of which, Photo 51, turned out to be the clue to the molecule’s structure. In what is widely — but not universally — regarded as a breach of research protocol, Dr. Wilkins provided the X-ray image to Dr. Watson and Mr. Crick without Dr. Franklin’s knowledge.
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Over the years Dr. Watson acquired a reputation for challenging scientific orthodoxy and for brash, unpleasant and even bigoted outspokenness. At one time or another he was quoted as disparaging gay men and women, girls who were not “pretty” and the intelligence and initiative generally of women, as well as of people with dark skin. At a lecture at Berkeley in 2000, he suggested a connection between exposure to sunlight and sex drive, saying it would explain why there are Latin lovers but not English lovers. And he once said that he felt bad whenever he interviewed an overweight job applicant because he knew he wasn’t going to hire someone who was fat.
Dr. Watson escaped serious consequences for his remarks until 2007, when he was traveling to promote his memoir “Avoid Boring People: Lessons From a Life in Science,” published that year. He was quoted in The Sunday Times as saying that while “there are many people of color who are very talented,” he was “inherently gloomy about the prospects of Africa.”
Social policies assume comparable intelligence levels, he went on, “whereas the testing says not really.”
The remarks provoked widespread outrage, but they stung particularly at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, which early on had become known as a leader in eugenics, a theory supposedly aimed at improving the genetic quality of the human race through selective breeding. Today, eugenics is recognized as a racist enterprise that gave rise to, among other things, forced sterilization, restrictions on immigration and, in its ultimate horror in Nazi Germany, the Holocaust.
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Though Dr. Watson immediately apologized “unreservedly,” saying “there is no scientific basis for such a belief,” his remarks produced a swirl of denunciations and canceled speaking engagements. Within a week, he had resigned as chancellor of the laboratory.
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In 2014, Dr. Watson put his Nobel medal up for auction at Christie’s, saying he would use the proceeds of the sale to provide for his family and support scientific research. But there was some speculation that the sale was a gesture of defiance directed at a scientific community that he felt had abandoned him.
A Russian billionaire, Alisher Usmanov, bought the medal for $4.1 million — and returned it to him.
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Dr. Watson leaves an enormous scientific legacy — his work on the structure of DNA; his inaugural leadership in the sequencing of the human genome, one of the biggest and most significant international scientific efforts ever completed; the researchers he encouraged; and his work at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, now a major global institution with a string of Nobel laureates among its faculty and associates. His books, especially “The Double Helix,” will no doubt be read as long as people study biology.
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