James Watson

 

“The photograph flicked on the screen for bare seconds, but it put James Watson in a frenzy of excitement. He was in Naples in 1951, at a lecture given by Maurice Wilkins, a physicist working at King’s College, London. What the photo showed was an X-ray diffraction of DNA, the information store of life, which strongly suggested that each molecule had repetitive motifs. Determining what DNA looked like was exactly the problem Dr Watson was about to work on at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, together with the physicist Francis Crick. There they could build hypothetical models and brew ideas in their heads; but their real need was for photographs. At the end of the lecture he rushed after Wilkins but, for the moment, he had vanished.

 

He, Crick and Wilkins were not the only ones obsessed with anatomising DNA. So was Linus Pauling at Caltech, who every so often gave signs that he was going to beat them to it. The race was on to find the key to traits, illnesses, features and inheritance, which would revolutionise both biology and medicine. The fact that the Watson-Crick duo got there first, in 1953 (and, with Wilkins, won the Nobel prize for physiology or medicine in 1962) was the result of hard work, a mad scramble and bad manners.

 

The bad manners were that he persuaded Wilkins to show him the photograph without asking the permission of the crystallographer, Rosalind Franklin. He didn’t care for “Rosy”, as he and Crick called her. He thought her awkward, possessive and probably sexually repressed. (If only she would take her glasses off and do something with her hair.) Later he liked her better and thought her science first-rate; but that was after she had gracefully conceded that her theories were wrong and his and Crick’s were right.

 

They were more than right. And they were more than pretty, which was his favourite adjective for a good piece of science (or a good-looking woman). Something as beautiful as the double helix just had to exist. It looked much like a spiral staircase, two twisting sugar-phosphate chains between which the chemical bases, like steps, formed alternate pairings of adenine with thymine and guanine with cytosine. It had taken him a long time to plump for two chains rather than three or four, but that was a deciding factor. As a biologist, whose line of research (when he was not obsessing about DNA) involved sex in bacteria, he knew biological systems tended to come in pairs. And, vitally, that DNA pairing “immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material” as he and Crick laid out briefly, but with utmost speed, in Nature. This molecule could be worked with.

 

In his Nobel speech he called himself “very much the junior one”. His path to Stockholm had certainly been convoluted. Growing up in Chicago, he wanted only to watch birds. When he read Erwin Schrödinger’s “What is Life?” his interest changed to genes, but he spent a few years avoiding the chemistry that seemed to be essential. What he chiefly learned at university was that most scientists were stupid; that crap should be called out as crap, and that you could leapfrog over your peers by pursuing an idea that was thought too far ahead of its time. Crick struck him as a man like that, always proclaiming new theories, valid or not, in a voice that was shatteringly loud. His “junior one” liked to provoke him by preferring to spend the rare sunny days in cold, damp Cambridge playing tennis, and not in the lab.

 

With some relief, because he could not have stomached English food for much longer, most of his work after 1953 was back in the United States. There he oversaw the renaissance of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York and the creation of the molecular-biology department at Harvard, which he led from 1961 to 1976. When he first came to Cold Spring Harbor in 1947 it was like a run-down summer camp; under his guidance it became a first-class centre of genetic research, especially into cancer. Meanwhile his Harvard department also explored the paths opened up by the DNA revelations, notably in the treatment of mental illness—now a sharp, personal interest because his second son Rufus, born in 1970, had developed schizophrenia.

 

It was also because of Rufus that he missed the first meeting, in 1986, of the scientists he had gathered for another momentous project, the mapping of the human genome. He became both its first director and the second person to have his genome fully sequenced, publishing the results free online in 2007 for anyone to use. It was a good way to reinforce the argument he had had in the early 1990s with the head of the National Institutes of Health, who thought that genes should be patented. He believed they never should. His own genome belonged to the world.

 

By then, however, the scientific world seemed less eager to have it. His straight talk, as he saw it, had been causing wide offence at least since 1968, when his vivid book on the DNA discoveries, “The Double Helix”, came out. His first title had been “Honest Jim”; both Crick and Wilkins persuaded Harvard not to publish it. Portraying Crick as a loudmouth was only the start. He also opined later that most of his colleagues were “pinkos and shits”. He persisted in his belief that women were intellectually deficient. He was sure no mother would want a homosexual child. Fat folk stood no chance of employment with him; nor did black people, whose IQs were inferior. Though he apologised for that opinion, he went on to repeat it.

 

As a result, his emeritus positions at Cold Spring Harbor fell away like autumn leaves and his wider reputation dived. This abandonment, after all he had done for science, infuriated him. In high dudgeon, in 2014 he sold his gold Nobel medal, which fetched $4.8m and was at once returned to him by the buyer. In 1962 he had been incandescent when, despite returning to Harvard with a gleaming prize, there was no uplift in his salary. His Nobel medal, now financing his retirement, came good at last.” [1]

 

1. James Watson. The Economist; London Vol. 457, Iss. 9474,  (Nov 15, 2025): 82.