James Watson, who has died aged 97, had an extraordinary gift for science, combined with ruthless ambition and an arrogant disregard for most of his peers. These combined qualities earned him a key role in one of the 20th century’s most profound scientific revolutions, a share in a Nobel prize, a bestselling memoir, a place in science history and the anger of many of his colleagues.
With Francis Crick, at Cambridge University in 1953, Watson discovered the structure of the giant molecule DNA – deoxyribonucleic acid, found in almost every living cell – and demonstrated that all inheritance, and even life itself, could be explained by chemistry and physics. The discovery revealed new horizons in evolutionary, biological, medical, archaeological, conservation and criminal sciences, and launched an industrial revolution, all within the working lifetime of the discoverers.
In his 1968 memoir, The Double Helix, Watson recalled how, on 28 February 1953, his research partner Crick walked into the Eagle pub in Cambridge and announced: “We have discovered the secret of life.” Earlier that day they had finally cracked the mystery of the genetic code in their research in the Cavendish Laboratory. They showed how DNA carried the genetic code, written in a chemical alphabet of four letters, A, C, G and T: the letters stood for adenine, thymine, guanine and cytosine.
Heralded as one of the greatest achievements of all time, it was more than just another chapter in the absorbing story of the search for the secret of life. The idea that DNA probably held the secret to understanding genetic inheritance was beginning to evolve among some leading biochemists and biologists. For Watson and Crick it was a conviction. They proved their case when they showed that the DNA molecule consisted of two strands shaped like a gently twisted ladder, a double helix, which could “unzip” to make copies of itself.
In The Double Helix, Watson wove drama and conflict into a story of an international race for glory, fuelled by boundless ambition, hampered occasionally by the dead hand of bureaucracy, and winning through to defy the received scientific wisdom of the day, all the while failing to find the other thing he most yearned for – a proper girlfriend.
His account was told with more than a trace of hubris and sprinkled with coruscating comments about his peers such as “a goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull but also just stupid”. What also emerged was the synergy that existed between two men who, in many ways, made an odd couple.
Watson and Crick met in 1951. They could scarcely have been more different: Watson a brash, competitive, young American and Crick a mature, middle-class, intellectually confident Englishman. At 35, Crick was 12 years older than his new research partner; he was also a late starter in biology. He had graduated in physics in 1938 from University College London, and his budding research career had been cut short by the start of the second world war.
From 1940 to 1947, Crick worked for the Admiralty on the development of radar and magnetic mines, but still had no PhD. Watson, on the other hand, was a young man in a hurry.
Born in Chicago, the only son of James D Watson, a businessman, and his wife, Jean (nee Mitchell), he was a child prodigy by most standards. He was 15 years old when he got a place at the University of Chicago in 1943 to study zoology. By the time he graduated with a BSc at 19, he had developed a serious interest in genetics.
This new interest drew him to the research laboratory of Hermann Muller, at Indiana University in Bloomington, who had shaken genetics research from a moribund state. Muller helped establish the chromosome theory of heredity; but his main work, which kickstarted modern genetics, was to show that genes could mutate artificially.
Muller was an irascible character, and the precocious Watson did not hit it off with him. Fortunately, he did get along with Salvador Luria, the eminent Italian microbiologist who had moved from Turin to Indiana in 1940, and under Luria’s training Watson got his PhD and developed his belief that genes were made of DNA rather than protein – the received wisdom in biology.
In the search for the evidence, he got a grant in 1950 to work in Copenhagen with the biochemist Herman Kalckar and the microbiologist Ole Maaløe. Kalckar in May 1951 took the young American to a symposium at the Zoological Station at Naples. There, Watson saw for the first time one of the first images to have been obtained of a DNA crystal.
The image was in the form of an X-ray diffraction pattern taken by Maurice Wilkins, a biophysicist from King’s College London. After the first glimpse of Wilkins’s DNA molecule, Watson was hooked on the idea that DNA was the stuff from which genes were made. He immediately decided to change the direction of his research. Instead of trying to understand genetics by doing test tube experiments with viruses and bacteria (phage research), he wanted to explore the structural chemistry of DNA.
It meant following a line of research that ran counter to the mainstream thinking in biology and biochemistry, which assumed the gene would be protein, not nucleic acid.
Watson wrote later that “a potential key to the secret of life was impossible to push out of my mind. It was certainly better to imagine myself becoming famous than maturing into a stifled academic who had never risked a thought.” He shared this with his former tutor, Luria, as well as his ambition to get a place at Cambridge because it was a centre of research on the structure of large biological molecules.
Watson was lucky. Early in August 1951, Luria arranged for him to work as a research assistant to John Kendrew at the Cavendish Laboratory. Kendrew needed help with his X-ray diffraction studies on myoglobin, the oxygen-transporting pigment in muscle. Watson was given space at the Cavendish in the same room as Crick, a scientist who, by chance, shared the same conviction about DNA. So they set about solving the structure of DNA; even though a lot of the time Crick played truant from his other research, and more than once incurred the wrath of Lawrence Bragg, head of the Cavendish.
Watson was not much better. At the Nobel prize-giving ceremony in 1962, he said: “Almost as soon as I set foot in the Cavendish, I inwardly knew I would not be of much help to John [Kendrew]. I had already started talking with Francis [Crick]. Perhaps even without Francis, I would have quickly bored of myoglobin. But with Francis to talk to, my fate was sealed.”
Watson and Crick’s approach was to make physical models to narrow down the possibilities and eventually create an accurate picture of the molecule. They were guided by laboriously gathered X-ray diffraction data obtained by other people but under-analysed.
Model-building was Watson’s forte; Crick knew all the mathematical intricacies of interpreting the angles and intensities of the pattern of spots that is the image created by X-ray diffraction. Using the data, Watson and Crick made a huge intuitive leap when they proposed that the structure of DNA was a winding helix in which pairs of the bases labelled A, T, G and C held the two strands together in a special way.
When their discovery was published in the journal Nature, their paper contained one of the most famous understatements in the history of science. They said: “It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.” Crick, Watson and Wilkins were awarded the Nobel prize in 1962.
From 1953 to 1955 Watson was a senior research fellow in biology at the California Institute of Technology, where he collaborated with Alexander Rich in X-ray diffraction studies of RNA (ribonucleic acid). In 1955-56 he was back in the Cavendish, again working with Crick, and on this visit they published several papers on the general principles of virus construction.
Then Watson moved to Harvard University to complete major research into the role of RNA in protein synthesis in collaboration with the Swiss biochemist Alfred Tissières, the French biochemist François Gros and the US biochemist Walter Gilbert.
In 1968 he was invited to become director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Long Island, New York, which he turned into a scientific powerhouse. His role as administrator was unexpected.
Known for his untidiness and absentmindedness, Watson turned into a brilliant fundraiser and advocate for basic research in science. Under his direction, this renowned but financially endangered institution was revitalised. He steered the laboratory into the field of tumour virology, from which emerged much of the present understanding of oncogenes (cancer genes) and the molecular basis of cancer.
In addition to high-level research on cancer, plant molecular biology, cell biochemistry and neuroscience, the Cold Spring Harbor functions as a postgraduate university on DNA science: each year, thousands of scientists from around the world are drawn to its professional meetings and advanced courses.
Watson’s successes led to his appointment in 1990 as head of a huge international research venture, the Human Genome Project, centred on the US National Institutes of Health. Designed to sequence the human genome in its entirety, the HGP was the most ambitious, generously funded endeavour in biology. Its potential dividends for medicine were enormous, albeit uncertain, and Watson rallied considerable support for what at the time seemed a preposterous gamble. Gene sequencing was a laborious, costly, error-strewn and agonisingly slow process and genetic research was itself widely regarded with suspicion in the US and Europe.
At the time, many argued that the project was either impossible, or, if possible, wasteful and even dangerous. But the attempt stimulated dramatic advances in computer-driven automation, and by 2003, huge teams of researchers in new, purpose-built laboratories had completed the entire genetic “instruction manual” for hundreds of viral and bacterial diseases, for algae, yeasts, the fruit fly, the zebra fish, a nematode worm, rice, a weed called thalecress, rice, wheat, a poplar tree, the laboratory mouse, the dog, the chimpanzee and several humans, including Watson himself.
Within Watson’s lifetime, researchers began to study human genomes by the 10,000-fold, and that one effort spawned new scientific disciplines – epigenetics, genomics and bioinformatics among them – and led to extraordinary new insight into human and other evolutionary histories.
But no organism had ever been sequenced and it took until 1995 before researchers announced the first success, the Haemophilus influenzae bacterium. Watson left the Human Genome Project in 1992, but by the time he had done so, he and his British and American research partners had agreed that their discoveries would be published promptly, each day, and made available worldwide, to prevent any individual attempts to patent human genes and exploit the information for immediate commercial gain.
Watson also argued that a percentage of the project’s funding should go towards examining the social, legal and ethical issues raised by genetic discovery. He continued his work at Cold Harbor Laboratory and, in 1994, became president of the institution.
He had a rare gift both for making allies and provoking enemies. Brought up as a Catholic in the US midwest, he rejected the rightwing ideology then linked with both cultures. As a young unknown researcher in Britain, he was taken up by the novelist Naomi Mitchison and her family, and he made a large number of connections with left-leaning and liberal European intellectuals, including the great Russian physicist and scientific prankster George Gamow.
The British polymath and broadcaster Jacob Bronowski officiated as best man at his marriage in 1968 to Elizabeth Lewis. The narrative of Watson’s friendships and encounters reads like a chronicle of 20th-century biology.
He never suffered fools gladly. “To succeed in science, you have to avoid dumb people,” he wrote in A Passion for DNA (2000).
The Double Helix – he had wanted to call it Honest Jim, a reference both to Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim and Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim – provoked anger even among colleagues as clever and as famous as Watson himself.
These included Crick, Wilkins and Bragg. Watson’s revelation that he and Crick had exploited evidence obtained by Wilkins’s colleague Rosalind Franklin, without involving her in their success, also caused a storm that was to haunt him for the rest of his life. She died in 1958, four years before Nobel recognition of the endeavour, and prizes are not awarded posthumously. Crick and Wilkins both died in 2004.
When in 1962 reporters asked him whether his discovery would lead to the genetic improvement of humans, Watson answered (as he admitted in his 2007 memoir Avoid Boring People): “If you want to have an intelligent child, you should have an intelligent wife.” Edward O Wilson, one of the great biologists of his age, described Watson at Harvard as “the most unpleasant human being I had ever met”, and dubbed him “the Caligula of biology”.
Watson’s talent for the verbal equivalent of the hand grenade finally exploded his scientific career: in 2007 he told the Sunday Times he was inherently gloomy about the prospect for Africa because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really”.
The casual implication that some genetic lineages – in other words, races – were innately less intelligent than others was too much even for Watson’s keenest admirers: the Science Museum in London promptly cancelled a lecture he was due to give, and he ended a UK tour to promote his book by returning to the US, and resigning his post at Cold Spring Harbor. As he did so, he also apologised and conceded that there had been no scientific basis for his remarks.
In 2014, he became the first living Nobel laureate to sell his Nobel medal at auction. He told reporters: “Because I was an ‘unperson’, I was fired from the boards of companies, so I have no income, apart from my academic income.” He also said that he hoped the $4.1m sale would help him “re-enter public life”.
He got his wish, only to amplify his own public disgrace: on a PBS documentary American Masters: Decoding Watson, in 2019, he repeated the opinions he had ventured in 2007. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory trustees promptly condemned his remarks as a misuse of science to justify prejudice, and utterly incompatible with the laboratory’s mission. They revoked his honorary titles, including chancellor emeritus.
This sorry end to an extraordinary career was doubly ironic: the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory had, much earlier in the 20th century, been the headquarters of the notorious Eugenics Record Office, and its then director had once testified to the US Congress that people from southern Europe were “genetically prone to criminality”.
Watson, in his years at the laboratory, had been aware of the ugly history of eugenics, and had done as much as any man to defuse public alarm about genetic research, and to challenge the kind of “sloppy if not dishonest” science once practised at his own laboratory, and used by bigots for unjust and even wicked political decisions.
Watson’s finest achievements gained worldwide recognition from universities and governments, including an honorary knighthood in 2002.
He is survived by Elizabeth, their sons, Rufus and Duncan, and a grandson.
James Dewey Watson, geneticist and molecular biologist, born 6 April 1928; died 6 November 2025
