James Dewey Watson, the American biologist whose name became synonymous with the discovery of DNA’s double-helical structure, died Thursday in a hospice in East Northport, Long Island, at 97. “With deep sadness we mourn the passing of Dr. James Watson, Nobel Prize-winning scientist and former director and president of CSHL. We extend our sincerest condolences to his wife Liz and to his family in these difficult times. We acknowledge Dr. Watson’s incredible contributions to science and the research community,” wrote Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on its X account. His son Duncan also confirmed the death.
Watson was twenty-five, a post-doctoral visitor at Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory, when he and British physicist Francis Crick proposed the twisted-ladder model of deoxyribonucleic acid. Their one-page paper, published in Nature in April 1953, energized biology and led to the modern biotechnology era. Along with Crick and Maurice Wilkins, Watson received the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine “for their discovery of the molecular structure of nucleic acids,” and the New York Times later called him “one of the most important scientists of the 20th century.”
He arrived at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory as director in 1968 and later served as president and chancellor. He expanded its programs to cancer genetics, neuroscience, and plant biology and led the Human Genome Project during its first two years, helping turn the laboratory into a global research center.
Watson’s later career was dominated by controversy. In a 2007 interview with the Sunday Times he said he was “intrinsically pessimistic about the future of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the premise that their intelligence is equal to ours, when in fact all the evidence shows the opposite.” Outrage followed; he resigned as Cold Spring Harbor chancellor at eighty and withdrew from public life. The laboratory stripped him of all honorary titles in 2019 after he repeated similar statements in a PBS documentary, calling his remarks “reprehensible” and “unsupported by science.”
Feeling ostracized, Watson auctioned his Nobel medal in 2014 for $4.8 million. Russian billionaire Alisher Usmanov bought the medal and returned it to him, saying he respected Watson’s scientific achievements.
Born 6 April 1928 in Chicago to parents of English, Scottish, and Irish descent, Watson entered the University of Chicago on scholarship at fifteen and graduated in zoology at nineteen. He earned his Ph.D. in 1950 at Indiana University under Salvador Luria and reached Cambridge in 1951, where he met Crick. Their work drew heavily on X-ray diffraction data produced by Rosalind Franklin and Raymond Gosling at King’s College London—information shared without Franklin’s knowledge; she died in 1958 and could not share the Nobel honor.
Watson later taught at Harvard for fifteen years, wrote the textbook Molecular Biology of the Gene, and published the memoir The Double Helix. The DNA discovery enabled genetic engineering, gene therapy, DNA profiling, and ancestry tracing.
Additional disputes arose from his comments about women in science, the right to abort fetuses predisposed to homosexuality, and obesity. Universities withdrew honorary degrees, and public invitations ceased. Watson issued apologies, saying his words “did not reflect what I wanted to say,” but his reputation never recovered.
In later years he faced health problems and financial strain yet remained an advocate for large-scale genomics, having been among the first people to have a full genome sequenced in 2007. He also pursued research on schizophrenia after his son Rufus received that diagnosis as a teenager.
The preparation of this article relied on a news-analysis system.