James Watson, dead at 97, was a scientific legend and a pariah among his peers

When biologist James Watson died on Thursday at age 97, it brought down the curtain on 20th-century biology the way the deaths of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson on the same day in 1826 (July 4, since the universe apparently likes irony) marked the end of 18th-century America. All three died well into a new century, of course, and all three left behind old comrades-in-arms. Yet just as the deaths of Adams and Jefferson symbolized the passing of an era that changed the world, so Watson’s marks the end of an epoch in biology so momentous it was called “the eighth day of creation.”

Do read some of the many Watson obituaries, which recount his Nobel-winning 1953 discovery, with Francis Crick, that the molecule of heredity, DNA, takes the form of a double helix, a sinuous staircase whose treads come apart to let DNA copy itself — the very foundation of inheritance and even life. They recount, too, Watson’s post-double-helix accomplishments, such as pulling Harvard University’s biology department, with its focus on whole animals (“hunters and trappers,” the professors were called) kicking and screaming into the new molecular era in the 1970s. Watson also transformed Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on New York’s Long Island — which he led from 1968 to 2007 — into a biology powerhouse, especially in genetics and cancer research. And starting in 1990 he served as first director of the Human Genome Project, giving his blessing to an effort that many biologists viewed with disdain (a Washington power struggle forced him out in 1992).

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