Watson shared in the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his role in elucidating the structure of DNA. Credit: AP
James Dewey Watson – who won the Nobel Prize for his role in divining the structure of DNA; was instrumental in initiating and propelling the Human Genome Project; and who became notorious for his history of racist and sexist comments – has died at 97.
The discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA paved the way for scientists to unravel the mechanisms behind genetic inheritance and how cells synthesize proteins. Gene therapies, the sequencing of the human genome and the development of monoclonal antibodies as treatments for cancer are just a few of the developments that would not have been possible without an understanding of DNA’s structure.
“The elucidation of the structure of the double helix goes down, along with Mendel and Darwin, as the three greatest discoveries in biology,” says Bruce Stillman, president of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, where Watson had various positions.
Landmark paper
Watson and Francis Crick, who worked together at the University of Cambridge, UK, solved the structure of DNA within a few years of their first meeting. In 1953, they published a seminal paper1 in Nature titled “A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid”. Watson had just turned 25.
“For him, nothing was impossible,” says Robert Martienssen, a geneticist at Cold Spring Harbor. “Nothing was out of reach.”
But the discovery of the DNA helix also became enmeshed in controversy. Watson and Crick elucidated the complex structure with the help of data and ideas from Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins, who were working at King’s College London at the time. Some of these data were shared without Franklin’s permission. Wilkins was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962 with Watson and Crick. Franklin had died of ovarian cancer 4 years earlier at the age of 37, and so was ineligible for the award.
What Rosalind Franklin truly contributed to the discovery of DNA’s structure
Watson and Crick, “could have — and should have — requested permission to use the data and made clear exactly what they had done, first to Franklin and Wilkins, and then to the rest of the world,” wrote Matthew Cobb, and Nathaniel Comfort, historians of science at the University of Manchester, UK, and Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, respectively, in a 2023 essay2 on Franklin.
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