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https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/07/science/james-watson-dead.html

James Watson, Co-Discoverer of the Structure of DNA, Is Dead at 97

His decoding the blueprint for life with Francis H.C. Crick made him one
of the most important scientists of the 20th century. He wrote a
celebrated memoir and later ignited an uproar with racist views.

By Cornelia Dean
Nov. 7, 2025
Updated 4:16 p.m. ET
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.

His death, in a hospice, was confirmed on Friday by his son Duncan, who
said Dr. Watson was transferred to the hospice from a hospital this week
after being treated there for an infection.

Dr. WatsonrCOs 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 worldrCOs 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 rCLAmerican MastersrCY 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 rCLthe Caligula of biology,rCY 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. WatsonrCOs tell-all memoir, rCLThe Double Helix,rCY 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 rCLThe Federalist PapersrCY and rCLThe Grapes of Wrath,rCY as one of the 88 most important American literary works. (The list was later expanded to 100.)

But it was in discerning the double-helix physical structure of deoxyribonucleic acid, the chromosome-building molecule and medium of
genetic inheritance, that won Dr. Watson and his co-discoverer, Francis
H.C. Crick, enduring fame and the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962.

In 1953, when Dr. Watson and Mr. Crick (as he was known then, before
earning his Ph.D.) made their discovery, relatively little was known about DNArCOs structure and action. Their work opened the door to the discovery of disease-causing genetic mutations, the design of genetically modified
crops, the tantalizing and terrifying new gene-splicing technology of
CRISPR Cas-9, and more.

rCLIt changed biology forever,rCY Bruce Stillman, who in 1994 took over from Dr. Watson as director of the Cold Spring Harbor lab, said in an interview
for this obituary in 2018.

For Dr. Stillman, the discovery of DNArCOs structure ranks with DarwinrCOs theory of evolution and MendelrCOs laws of genetic inheritance. rCLThe structure of DNA told us how inheritance occurs,rCY Dr. Stillman said, rCLbut it also explained mutation and hence evolution.rCY

Dr. Watson came to fame in 1953, when biologists were concluding that DNA
was at the center of genetic inheritance but could not say for sure what
it looked like, how its information was stored, how that information was passed from generation to generation, or how it might control the actions
of genes in cells.

In 1869, a Swiss biologist, Friedrich Miescher, had isolated a substance containing the DNA molecule rCo deoxyribonucleic acid rCo while studying the nucleus of white blood cells. He called the substance rCLnucleinrCY and theorized that it might have something to do with heredity.

Dr. MiescherrCOs name rCLfell into obscurity,rCY as researchers put it in a 2008
article in the journal Nature Education, but by the turn of the 20th
century, other biologists were building on his and other findings to
elucidate the moleculerCOs chemical components rCo work that fueled the ideas of Dr. Watson and Mr. Crick.

Dr. Watson had in 1951 abandoned biochemistry work in Copenhagen and moved
to the Cavendish Laboratory, part of the University of Cambridge in
England; he said he was determined to work with researchers there who
shared his fascination with DNA, which he considered the most important subject in biology.

There he encountered Mr. Crick, who, in his 30s, had resumed pursuing his war-interrupted Ph.D. His subject was ostensibly the protein structures of hemoglobin. In fact, he, too, was obsessed with DNA.

Breach of Protocol
Working with X-ray images obtained by Rosalind E. Franklin and Maurice
H.F. Wilkins, researchers at KingrCOs 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. FranklinrCOs, one of which, Photo 51, turned out to be the clue to the moleculerCOs structure. In what is widely rCo but not universally rCo regarded as a breach of research protocol, Dr. Wilkins provided the X-ray image to Dr. Watson and Mr. Crick without Dr.
FranklinrCOs knowledge.

Aided by that material, the two proposed that DNA was shaped like a kind
of twisted ladder whose outside rCLrailsrCY were formed of molecules of sugar and phosphate. Each of the ladderrCOs steps was formed of two of DNArCOs four chemical bases rCo adenine, thymine, cytosine and guanine. Adenine always paired up with thymine, and guanine always paired up with cytosine.

Enzymes within the cell could snip this twisted ladder down the middle
and, using bases from within the cell, create two new DNA molecules from
one.

Eager to beat their chief rival, the American chemist Linus C. Pauling of
the California Institute of Technology, Dr. Watson and Mr. Crick wrote up their discovery and hustled it into the journal Nature. Though their paper
was written in the typically flat tone of science and was barely a page
long, it was clear that its authors had realized that they were onto
something big.

Their proposed structure rCLhas novel features which are of considerable biological interest,rCY they wrote, adding, rCLIt has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a
possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.rCY

In other words, they could explain how genetic instructions could move
from one generation to the next.

In 1962, Dr. Watson, Dr. Wilkins and now Dr. Crick won the Nobel Prize for
the work. (Dr. Pauling, bested in the DNA race, won the 1962 Nobel Peace
Prize for his opposition to weapons of mass destruction; he had won the
prize in chemistry, in 1954, for his work on chemical bonds.)

If the Watson-Crick paper were published today, Dr. Franklin would almost certainly be listed as a co-author because of the importance of her work
in the development of the double-helix structure, said Nancy Hopkins, a molecular biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who
began working with Dr. Watson in the 1960s when she was an undergraduate
at Harvard.

But Dr. Franklin could not have shared the Nobel when it was awarded in
1962. She died of ovarian cancer in 1958, at 37, and the prize is not
given posthumously. (Nor is the prize ever shared by more than three
people.)

Today, Dr. Franklin is a heroine for feminists in science, who note that,
like most women at the time, she was underpaid, disrespected and often denigrated by male colleagues. Over the years, Dr. Watson played down her contribution, saying among other things that while her X-ray images were
good, she did not realize what she had.

Expressing attitudes retrograde even by the standards of the 1960s, Dr.
Watson famously described Dr. Franklin as a sexually repressed spinster
and an unimaginative researcher. He and Dr. Wilkins called her rCLRosy,rCY a nickname she did not use, but never to her face.

Ironically, rCLJim WatsonrCOs memoir made Rosalind Franklin famous,rCY said Victor K. McElheny, a science writer whose biography, rCLWatson and DNA: Making a Scientific Revolution,rCY was published in 2003. Interviewed for
this obituary in 2018, he said that Dr. Franklin and Dr. Wilkins had their
own papers in the same issue of Nature as the Watson-Crick bombshell. (Mr. McElheny died in July.)

Dr. Wilkins, who continued researching DNA at KingrCOs, died in 2004. Dr. Crick eventually moved to the Salk Institute in La Jolla, Calif., where he researched theoretical neurobiology and consciousness. He died in 2004.

Dr. Watson eventually moved from Cambridge, England, to Cambridge, Mass., where, in 1955, he accepted an appointment as assistant professor of
biology at Harvard.

He was an inspiring teacher, Dr. Hopkins recalled, though he had a
tendency to turn his back on his students and mumble into his blackboard. rCLHe was so much fun to be around,rCY she said. rCLBut he was easily bored, and
if he was bored he would turn and walk away in the middle of a sentence.rCY

Dr. Watson was an astute talent-spotter among his undergraduate and
graduate students, and he helped start notable research careers for more
than a few of them, including women like Dr. Hopkins. Fascinated by a
lecture he gave, she asked if she could work in his lab. He agreed,
beginning an association that ripened into enduring friendship.

She said he told her: rCLrCyYou should be a scientist. You have the kind of mind I have, and you are just as smart as I am.rCOrCY

Over the years, he advised her on her graduate studies, she said. rCLEvery time I would get discouraged, I would go talk to him and he would say,
rCyNo, you have to keep going.rCOrCY

Dr. Watson rCLrecognized talent and supported it,rCY Dr. Stillman said. And, he added, unlike many senior scientists, Dr. Watson did not insist on
putting his name on the papers of his graduate students or postdoctoral researchers.

But Dr. WatsonrCOs racist remarks had rCLovershadowed his support of women in science,rCY Dr. Stillman said.

Unpopular at Harvard
Dr. WatsonrCOs relations with the rest of the Harvard biology faculty were fraught. He offended his departmental colleagues by dismissing evolution, taxonomy, ecology and other biological research as rCLstamp collecting,rCY saying those fields must give way to the study of molecules and cells.

rCLI found him the most unpleasant human being I had ever met,rCY one of his young colleagues, the evolutionary biologist E.O. Wilson, wrote in a 1994 memoir, rCLNaturalist.rCY

It was Dr. Wilson who maintained that Dr. Watson, having achieved fame
with stunning work and at an early age, had become rCLthe Caligula of biology.rCY

rCLHe was given license to say anything that came to his mind and expect to
be taken seriously,rCY Dr. Wilson wrote. rCLAnd unfortunately, he did so, with a casual and brutal offhandedness.rCY

Then and later, Dr. Watson declared proudly that he was just speaking his mind. He originally chose the title rCLHonest JimrCY for the memoir that became rCLThe Double Helix.rCY

The book, written in a breezy style, was a rCLbeautifully brashrCY and rCLintensely personalrCY recounting of events leading up to one of the greatest discoveries of biology, the sociologist of science Robert K.
Merton wrote on the cover of The New York Times Book Review.

rCLI know of nothing quite like it in all the literature about scientists at work,rCY he wrote.

Dr. CrickrCOs initial reaction to the book was fury. He said Dr. Watson had focused on himself to the detriment of others involved in the project.
(Dr. Hopkins said that the early versions of rCLThe Double HelixrCY that Dr. Watson had given her to read rCLwere a lot more outrageous than what was published.rCY)

Dr. Wilkins did not much like the book, either. He and Dr. Crick objected
so strenuously that Harvard University Press dropped its plans to publish
the work; it appeared instead in two installments in The Atlantic Monthly
and was later published by Atheneum.

The book was a best seller. An annotated version came out in 2012,
offering an even richer picture of the DNA triumph. And Dr. Crick
eventually got over his anger.

At Harvard, Dr. Watson also wrote rCLMolecular Biology of the Gene,rCY his first in a series of notable textbooks. The book, now with co-authors in
later editions, remains one of the most influential, widely used and
admired texts in the history of biology.

Dr. Watson made his first visit to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, the establishment he would eventually restore to scientific prominence, in
1948. He attended meetings there with fellow researchers on the genetics
of viruses that affect bacteria rCo bacteriophages, or phages rCo and over the next few years these summer meetings were repeated, attracting more researchers. Dr. Watson presented a paper there in 1953, just weeks after
he and Dr. Crick had published their double helix finding.

But by 1968 when he was recruited to lead it, the lab, located in a
onetime whaling port on the North Shore of Long Island, had faded from prominence. Dr. Watson more or less abandoned hands-on research to turn
that situation around. With a knack for administration and fund-raising,
he set the labrCOs focus on microbiology aimed at understanding, diagnosing and treating the genetics of cancer. It was a prescient choice: In 1971, President Richard M. Nixon declared rCLwarrCY on cancer. rCLAnd hence there was
considerable funding,rCY Dr. Stillman said.

Dr. Watson also built up the labrCOs educational offerings, established a graduate program, expanded its array of conferences and created a program
for high school students studying DNA. That program is now rCLthe largest
high school laboratory program in genetics and biology in the world,rCY Dr. Stillman said last year.

And when researchers began to realize that it would be possible to
decipher the entire sequence of genes in the human genome, Dr. Watson
called them to a meeting at Cold Spring Harbor to discuss it. When the
federal government established the Human Genome Project, it turned to Dr. Watson to be its first leader.

He recruited leading scientists and set the projectrCOs agenda. For one
thing, he proposed that it should first work on model organisms like the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans, on the theory that this research would
pay dividends down the line. It did.

He also said that the project should be an international project, with researchers from other countries, and that the American government effort should be run by the National Institutes of Health. And he insisted that 3 percent of its budget go to the study of the projectrCOs social, moral and ethical implications. (That figure was later raised to 5 percent.)

A rCLworking draftrCY was concluded in 2000 with a list of three billion letters in the human genetic code. It was hailed on June 26 in televised announcements by President Bill Clinton from the White House and Prime Minister Tony Blair at 10 Downing Street. Three years later, scientists announced the project officially over.

Dr. Watson had left the project in 1992 in a dispute over the patenting of genes, an idea that was backed by the Bush administration but was one that
he despised. He was vindicated, in a way, in 2013, when the United States Supreme Court ruled that the discovery of a natural product, like a gene,
did not warrant a patent rCo though the creation of new products from
natural substances might.

rCLHe was fundamentally opposed to the blueprint of life being patented,rCY Dr. Stillman said. rCLHis view has held up.rCY

Son of a Debt Collector
James Dewey Watson was born in Chicago on April 6, 1928, one of two
children of James Dewey Watson, a debt collector for La Salle Extension University, a correspondence school based in Chicago, and the former Jean Mitchell, who worked in the University of Chicago admissions office and
was active in Democratic Party politics.

James grew up on the South Side of Chicago and attended South Shore High School. A precocious student, he was a contestant on the 1940s radio
series rCLQuiz Kids,rCY broadcast from Chicago. At 15, he enrolled in the University of Chicago, and it was there that he encountered a book about biology, written for a lay audience by the quantum physicist Erwin Schr||dinger. The book, rCLWhat Is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell,rCY convinced the young Watson that genes were the key component of living cells.

After graduating in 1947, he went on to graduate school at Indiana
University, where he encountered two giants in the field, Hermann J.
Muller and Salvador E. Luria. (Dr. Muller won the Nobel Prize in
Physiology or Medicine in 1946, and Dr. Luria was similarly honored in
1969.)

Under Dr. LuriarCOs guidance, Dr. Watson received his doctorate in 1950. He then headed for Cambridge and fame.

Six-foot-two, gangly and perennially rumpled, Dr. Watson fit right in at
the quarters he shared with Mr. Crick at the Cavendish Laboratory, an amenity-free premises known as rCLThe Hut.rCY Decades later, his disheveled hair gray and thinning, he still walked with a lurching gait, often
veering awkwardly off his path when someone or something attracted his attention.

As a young man he bemoaned his single status and made no bones about the
fact that he was in search of a wife. His search ended in 1968, when,
about to turn 40, he married Elizabeth Lewis, a 19-year-old sophomore of Radcliffe College at Harvard. They had two sons, Rufus and Duncan. In a
2003 interview with The Guardian, Dr. Watson described RufusrCOs severe
mental illness, which he called a rCLgenetic injustice.rCY

He often said that his sonrCOs illness had been rCLa big incentiverCY for him to
join the genome project.

His wife, an architectural preservationist, his sons and one grandson
survive him.

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 rCLprettyrCY 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 wasnrCOt 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 rCLAvoid Boring People: Lessons From
a Life in Science,rCY published that year. He was quoted in The Sunday Times as saying that while rCLthere are many people of color who are very talented,rCY he was rCLinherently gloomy about the prospects of Africa.rCY

Social policies assume comparable intelligence levels, he went on,
rCLwhereas the testing says not really.rCY

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.

rCLJim has made some very silly comments in his life,rCY Dr. Stillman said. rCLPerhaps those are the worst.rCY

Though Dr. Watson immediately apologized rCLunreservedly,rCY saying rCLthere is
no scientific basis for such a belief,rCY his remarks produced a swirl of denunciations and canceled speaking engagements. Within a week, he had resigned as chancellor of the laboratory.

For Sale: A Nobel Medal
In 2014, Dr. Watson put his Nobel medal up for auction at ChristierCOs,
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
rCo and returned it to him.

In 2007, Dr. Watson became the second person to have his full genome sequenced. The first was J. Craig Venter, who as president of the Celera Corporation started a human genome sequencing project originally in competition with the government effort. Both men made their genomes
available to researchers.

Today, commercial concerns sell sequencing efforts to the public. And the double helix has entered popular culture. Its image has appeared on
commercial products ranging from jewelry to perfume and on postage stamps issued by countries as various as Gabon and Monaco. Salvador Dal|! incorporated the image in a painting, and the performance artists who make
up Blue Man Group use the image in their shows.

It has also been reproduced in countless publications, often twisting the wrong way rCo an error so common that researchers have built web pages about it.

Dr. Watson was once quoted as saying that he should be played in the
movies by John McEnroe, the international bad boy of tennis, but when the
BBC made a movie about Dr. Watson and Dr. Crick and the double helix, the American actor Jeff Goldblum played him as a tall, stooping and gum-
chewing figure. (Dr. Crick and Dr. Franklin were played by the British
actors Tim Pigott-Smith and Juliet Stevenson.) The movie, rCLLife StoryrCY (also known in the United States as rCLThe Race for the Double HelixrCY or rCLDouble HelixrCY), first ran on television in 1987.

Dr. Watson leaves an enormous scientific legacy rCo 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 rCLThe Double Helix,rCY will no doubt be read as long as people study biology.

When the sequencing of the genome was announced in 2000, President Clinton referred to the work as revealing GodrCOs rCLbook of life.rCY But Dr. Watson attributed his success as a researcher in part to his lack of religious belief. He once described himself as an rCLescapeerCY from the Roman Catholic faith.

rCLThe luckiest thing that ever happened to me was that my father didnrCOt believe in God,rCY he told Discover magazine in an interview on the 50th anniversary of the publication of the double helix paper.

That was not to say he did not have faith. In his resignation statement in 2007, he referred to the rCLfaithrCY in reason and social justice that he shared with his Scottish and Irish forebears, especially, he said, rCLthe
need for those on top to help care for the less fortunate.rCY

Kate Zernike contributed reporting.

Cornelia Dean is a science writer and the former science editor of The
Times. She is the author of rCLMaking Sense of Science.rCY
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