Nobel winner, DNA pioneer

Scientist decoded the structure of life, left legacy that changed biology and medicine.

- BY JOHN JOHNSON

A SCIENTIFIC BREAKTHROUGH American scientist James Watson attends a Nobel laureate meeting in 1967 in Lindau, Germany. In 1962, he shared the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine with England's Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins.

GERHARD RAUCHWETTER Picture Alliance

On a chilly February afternoon in 1953, a gangly American and a fast-talking Brit walked into the Eagle pub in Cambridge, England, and announced to the assembled imbibers that they had discovered the "secret of life." Even by the grandiose standards of bar talk, it was a provocative statement.

Except, it was also pretty close to the truth. That morning, James Watson, the American whiz kid who had not yet turned 25, and his British colleague, Francis Crick, finally had worked out the structure of DNA.

Everything that followed, unlocking the human genome, learning to edit and move genetic information to cure disease and create new forms of life, the revolution in criminal justice with DNA fingerprinting, and many other things besides, grew out of the discovery of the double-helix shape of DNA.

It took Watson decades to feel worthy of a breakthrough some consider the equal of Einstein's famous E=MC2 formula. But he got there. "Did Francis and I deserve the double helix?" Watson asked rhetorically, 40 years later. "Yeah, we did."

James Dewey Watson, Nobel Prize winner and "semi-professional loose cannon" whose racist views made him a scientific pariah late in life, died Thursday in hospice care after a brief illness, according to officials at his former lab, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. He was 97.