James Watson, dead at 97, was a scientific legend and a pariah among his peers
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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\u2019s marks the end of an epoch in biology so momentous it was called \u201cthe eighth day of creation.\u201d<\/p>\n
Do read some of the many Watson<\/a> obituaries<\/a>, 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 \u2014 the very foundation of inheritance and even life. They recount, too, Watson\u2019s post-double-helix accomplishments, such as pulling Harvard University\u2019s biology department, with its focus on whole animals (\u201chunters and trappers,\u201d 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\u2019s Long Island \u2014 which he led from 1968 to 2007 \u2014 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).<\/p>\n