James Watson

• 1. Two Pages in Nature

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  James Watson put his name to a scientific paper that fills just two pages of the journal Nature, pages 737 and 738 of volume 171. Watson, an American molecular biologist, wrote it with Francis Crick in 1953. Its subject was DNA, and its claim was a proposed shape for that molecule: a double helix.

  The paper made Watson famous, and the fame never stayed simple. Over the decades that followed, he was praised, honored, feared, and finally cast out by the institution he once led.

  This documentary asks three questions. What path leads a young bird watcher from Chicago to those two pages? Whose measurements did the authors rely on, and how did they treat her? And how does a scientist so celebrated end up severed from the laboratory he once led?

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• 2. Birds and Belief

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  James Dewey Watson was born in Chicago on the 6th of April 1928, the only son of Jean and James D. Watson. His father was a businessman descended mostly from colonial English immigrants. His maternal grandfather, Lauchlin Mitchell, was a tailor from Glasgow, and his maternal grandmother, Lizzie Gleason, was the child of parents from County Tipperary in Ireland.

  Religion sat quietly at the center of the household. His mother was a modestly religious Catholic, while his father was an Episcopalian who had lost his belief in God. Watson was raised Catholic, yet he later called himself "an escapee from the Catholic religion." He also said, "The luckiest thing that ever happened to me was that my father didn't believe in God." By age 11 he had stopped attending mass and embraced the "pursuit of scientific and humanistic knowledge." He stayed an atheist, and in 2003 he was one of 22 Nobel laureates who signed the Humanist Manifesto.

  On the South Side of Chicago, Watson attended public schools, including Horace Mann Elementary School and South Shore High School. Bird watching, a hobby he shared with his father, fascinated him so much that he considered a career in ornithology. He also appeared on Quiz Kids, a popular radio show that put bright young contestants through a round of questions.

  The liberal policy of University of Chicago president Robert Hutchins let Watson enroll there, and a tuition scholarship followed at age 15. One of his professors, Louis Leon Thurstone, taught him factor analysis. Watson would later cite that statistical method when defending his controversial views on race.

  In 1946 Watson read Erwin Schrödinger's book What Is Life?, and it redirected his ambitions from birds to genetics. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in zoology the following year. In his memoir Avoid Boring People, he praised Chicago as an "idyllic academic institution" that gave him an "ethical compulsion not to suffer fools who impeded his search for truth." That impatience would follow him into every laboratory he entered.

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• 3. The Phage Group

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  Hermann Joseph Muller, the 1946 Nobel Prize winner, drew Watson to Indiana University in 1947. Muller had laid out the basic properties of the heredity molecule in papers from 1922-1929 and the 1930s. Yet it was Salvador Luria, not Muller, who became Watson's doctoral advisor, and Watson began his research in Luria's laboratory early in 1948.

  Luria belonged to the Phage Group, a distributed network of researchers who worked with bacteriophages, the viruses that infect bacteria. With Max Delbrück, he led a shift away from experimental systems such as Drosophila toward microbial genetics. Luria later shared the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the Luria-Delbrück experiment, which probed the nature of genetic mutations. Watson met Delbrück in Luria's apartment that spring, and again during his first trip to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory that summer.

  Members of the group sensed they were closing in on the physical nature of the gene. In 1949, a course with Felix Haurowitz taught Watson the conventional view that genes were proteins able to copy themselves. DNA, the other major component of chromosomes, was widely dismissed as a "stupid tetranucleotide" that only propped up the proteins. Watson knew better than most, because the Avery-MacLeod-McCarty experiment had suggested DNA was the genetic molecule. His own doctoral project used X-rays to inactivate bacterial viruses, and he received his degree in 1950.

  In September 1950, Watson went to Copenhagen University for a year of postdoctoral research, beginning with the biochemist Herman Kalckar. Kalckar studied how cells build nucleic acids, while Watson wanted to uncover the structure of DNA. The two never worked well together. Watson spent the rest of the year with the microbial physiologist Ole Maaløe, running experiments with radioactive phosphate to learn whether protein or DNA entered bacteria during infection. After consulting Delbrück, they judged their results inconclusive.

  Watson then accompanied Kalckar to a meeting in Italy, where he watched Maurice Wilkins present X-ray diffraction data on DNA. He left convinced that DNA had a distinct structure that could be worked out precisely. In 1951, the chemists Linus Pauling, Robert Corey and Herman Branson published their model of the amino acid alpha helix, built through X-ray crystallography and molecular modeling. That summer, Watson visited the Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn in Naples, and Luria met John Kendrew and arranged a new postdoctoral post for Watson in England. At the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, Watson met his future collaborator, Francis Crick.

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• 4. Building the Model

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  In mid-March 1953, Watson and Crick deduced the double helix structure of DNA. Sir Lawrence Bragg, director of the Cavendish Laboratory, announced the discovery at a Solvay conference on proteins in Belgium on the 8th of April 1953. The press did not report it. Watson and Crick submitted a paper called "Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid" to Nature, and it appeared on the 25th of April 1953.

  That same month, a group from the chemistry department at Oxford University came to see the model. Sydney Brenner, Jack Dunitz, Dorothy Hodgkin, Leslie Orgel and Beryl M. Oughton were among the first outsiders to look at it. According to Oughton, later known as Rimmer, Hodgkin announced they were off to Cambridge, and they all set out in two cars. Everyone was impressed, especially Brenner, who afterward worked with Crick at the Cavendish and at the new Laboratory of Molecular Biology.

  Publicity arrived slowly. The Cambridge student newspaper Varsity ran its own short article on the 30th of May 1953. In early June, six weeks after the Nature paper, Watson presented the double helix at the 18th Cold Spring Harbor Symposium on Viruses. Many people at the meeting had not yet heard of the discovery, and for them it was the first look at the model.

  In 1962, Watson, Crick and Wilkins received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. The citation praised "their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material." The work has been described as a turning point in science, the start of the modern era of biology. One name was missing from the prize list: Rosalind Franklin had died in 1958 and was therefore ineligible for nomination.

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• 5. Franklin's Data

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  Rosalind Franklin and her student Raymond Gosling produced the X-ray diffraction images that gave the strongest evidence that DNA was helical. Watson and Crick used this unpublished data without her knowledge or consent. They had three routes to it. Watson attended her 1951 seminar. Wilkins, who worked in the same laboratory as Franklin, discussed her results with them. And a Medical Research Council progress report, written to coordinate the laboratories that council supported, passed along more.

  Her data did real work. Franklin's estimates of the water content of DNA crystals fit a structure with the two sugar-phosphate backbones on the outside. She told Crick and Watson as much. Before that, Pauling and the Cambridge pair had built erroneous models with the chains inside and the bases pointing outward. Her identification of the space group of DNA crystals showed Crick that the two strands ran in opposite directions.

  The acknowledgment was thin. In a 1954 article, Watson and Crick conceded that without her data "the formulation of our structure would have been most unlikely, if not impossible." Watson later wrote in The Double Helix, "Rosy, of course, did not directly give us her data. For that matter, no one at King's realized they were in our hands." Critics say his portrayal made Franklin look like Wilkins' assistant, unable to interpret her own results. Brenda Maddox, writing in Nature in 2003, pointed to lines such as "Clearly Rosy had to go or be put in her place."

  Historians disagree about how to weigh her role. Robert P. Crease argues that Franklin was close to the structure but did not reach it, and that the title of discoverer goes to those who first fit the pieces together. Jeremy Bernstein rejects the idea of Franklin as a victim. Matthew Cobb and Nathaniel C. Comfort agree that "Franklin was no victim in how the DNA double helix was solved," yet they call her "an equal contributor to the solution of the structure."

  The archives at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory hold a quieter chapter. Letters show that Franklin and Watson later exchanged constructive scientific correspondence, and she consulted him about her tobacco mosaic virus RNA research. She began with "Dear Jim" and signed off "Best Wishes, Yours, Rosalind." Her own contribution, written with Gosling and titled "Molecular Configuration in Sodium Thymonucleate," sat on pages 740 and 741 of the very same Nature volume.

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• 6. Books and Rivals

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  "Honest Jim" was the title Watson first planned for the book he wrote in 1968. It became The Double Helix, the story of the DNA discovery along with the personalities, conflicts and controversy around it, laced with his private emotional impressions from the time. The Modern Library board later placed it seventh on its list of the 100 best nonfiction books.

  Harvard University Press was originally going to publish it. Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins, among others, objected, and Watson's home university dropped the project. A commercial publisher took it instead. In an interview with Anne Sayre for her 1975 book Rosalind Franklin and DNA, reissued in 2000, Crick called Watson's account a "contemptible pack of damned nonsense."

  Watson's textbooks drew less fire. The Molecular Biology of the Gene, published in 1965, used heads, which are brief declarative subheadings. His next textbook, Molecular Biology of the Cell, was written by coordinating a group of scientist-writers. His third, Recombinant DNA, explained how genetic engineering had revealed new information about how organisms function.

  In his 2007 memoir, Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science, Watson labeled academic colleagues "dinosaurs," "deadbeats," "fossils," "has-beens," "mediocre," and "vapid." Steve Shapin, writing in Harvard Magazine, noted that Watson had produced an unlikely "Book of Manners" about the skills a scientist needs at each stage of a career. Shapin added that Watson was known for pursuing his own goals aggressively at the university.

  E. O. Wilson once described Watson as "the most unpleasant human being I had ever met." The two had competed for funding at Harvard in their respective fields. In a later television interview, Wilson said he considered them friends and called the old rivalry "old history."

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• 7. Harvard to Genome

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  In 1956, Watson joined the biology department at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His work there focused on RNA and its role in transferring genetic information. He stayed on the faculty until 1976, even though he took over the directorship of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory eight years earlier.

  Watson also took public stands from Harvard. He led a group of 12 biologists and biochemists in a protest against the Vietnam War, calling for "the immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces from Vietnam." In 1975, on the thirtieth anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, he was among more than 2,000 scientists and engineers who warned President Gerald Ford about nuclear proliferation. They argued that no proven method existed for safely disposing of radioactive waste, and that nuclear plants were a security risk because terrorists might steal plutonium.

  Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Laurel Hollow, New York, became Watson's base in 1968, when he was appointed director. He turned its research toward cancer, and under him the laboratory expanded both its research and its science education programs. In 1994 he became president for 10 years, and then served as chancellor. Bruce Stillman, the laboratory's president, summed up his work with the words, "Jim Watson created a research environment that is unparalleled in the world of science."

  Watson married Elizabeth Lewis in 1968, and they had two sons, Rufus Robert in 1970 and Duncan James in 1972. By 1974 the family had settled permanently in Cold Spring Harbor. Rufus has schizophrenia, and Watson sometimes spoke about him to encourage progress in understanding how genetics contributes to mental illness.

  Former doctoral students of Watson who became notable in their own right include Mario Capecchi, Bob Horvitz, Peter B. Moore and Joan Steitz. Postdoctoral researchers he supervised included Phillip Allen Sharp, John Tooze and Richard J. Roberts. Ewan Birney and Ronald W. Davis also trained under him.

  In 1990, the National Institutes of Health appointed Watson head of the Human Genome Project. He held the post until the 10th of April 1992, when conflict with the new NIH director, Bernadine Healy, ended it. Healy sought patents on gene sequences, and Watson opposed any ownership of the "laws of nature." Two years earlier he had said, "The nations of the world must see that the human genome belongs to the world's people, as opposed to its nations." He left within weeks of the announcement that the NIH would apply for patents on brain-specific cDNAs. Francis Collins took over the project, which finished mapping the human genome in 2003.

  Craig Venter provided a second source of friction. Watson disagreed with Venter's use of EST fragments while Venter worked at the NIH, and the feud continued after Venter founded Celera Genomics. Watson was quoted calling him "Hitler." Yet in 2007 Watson became the second person after Venter to publish his fully sequenced genome online. It was presented to him on the 31st of May 2007 by 454 Life Sciences Corporation, working with the Human Genome Sequencing Center at Baylor College of Medicine. He said he hoped to encourage "an era of personalized medicine."

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• 8. Remarks and Reckoning

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  In 1997, The Sunday Telegraph quoted Watson on prenatal choice and sexuality. Richard Dawkins wrote to The Independent claiming the paper had misrepresented him and that Watson simply favored letting people choose. Three years later Watson said of obesity, "Whenever you interview fat people, you feel bad, because you know you're not going to hire them." He backed genetic screening and engineering in lectures and interviews, argued that stupidity is a disease, and said the "really stupid" bottom 10% of people should be cured.

  At a conference in 2000, Watson suggested a link between skin color and sex drive. He also claimed that stereotypes about racial and ethnic groups had a genetic basis. On black and white intelligence, he said that all the testing showed the two groups were not really the same. He repeatedly asserted that differences in average measured IQ between blacks and whites were due to genetics.

  The crisis came in early October 2007, when Charlotte Hunt-Grubbe interviewed Watson at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. He discussed his view that Africans are less intelligent than Westerners. He said he meant to promote science, not racism, but some UK venues canceled his appearances and he canceled the rest of his tour. An editorial in Nature called his remarks "beyond the pale," yet wished he had stayed so he could face his critics in person. The laboratory's trustees suspended his administrative duties. Watson apologized and retired at age 79 from what the laboratory called "nearly 40 years of distinguished service."

  In 2008 he became chancellor emeritus, and in a BBC documentary that year he said he did not see himself as a racist. In January 2019, after a television documentary broadcast the previous year in which he repeated his views, the laboratory revoked his honorary titles and cut all remaining ties. Watson did not respond. Writing in Time, Jeffery Kluger set his scientific legacy against his racist and sexist comments and asked whether the first can be lauded without endorsing the second. The legal historian Paul Lombardo noted that Watson had opposed state-sponsored forced sterilization, only to undermine himself by repeatedly alleging that racism was genetically justified.

  In 2014, Watson published a paper in The Lancet proposing that a lack of biological oxidants, rather than an excess, underlies diseases such as diabetes. One critic thought the paper unworthy and published only because of his name, while others supported the hypothesis. That December, complaining of being made an "unperson," he sold his Nobel Prize medal at Christie's, becoming the first living laureate to auction one. He meant to support conservation on Long Island and research at Trinity College, Dublin. The buyer, Alisher Usmanov, later returned the medal to him.

  Watson died in East Northport, New York, on the 6th of November 2025, a week after entering hospice care following treatment for an infection. He was 97. The New York Times called him one of the most important scientists of the 20th century while acknowledging the controversy over his racial views. The BBC noted that his work was "setting the stage for rapid advances in molecular biology."

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