Jon Cohen writes:

“It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.” That famous understatement concludes the 1953 Nature article in which James Watson, then just 25, and Francis Crick announced their discovery of the double helical structure of DNA. In his later life, Watson, who died on 6 November at 97, was anything but understated.

The son of a Chicago bill collector, Watson shared a Nobel Prize with Crick and Maurice Wilkins for their DNA work, laid the groundwork for Harvard University’s first molecular biology program, contributed to the discovery of messenger RNA, authored a seminal textbook and a best selling memoir, led the ascent of a financially struggling Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) into a scientific powerhouse, and headed the Human Genome Project. But Watson gained notoriety for unrepentant racist views that cost him his job at CSHL in 2007 and, in 2019, led the institution to revoke his emeritus status and condemn him for “the misuse of science to justify prejudice.” He also was lambasted for sexism, including his dismissive treatment in his memoir, The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA, of work done by Rosalind Franklin that helped him and Crick crack the riddle of DNA’s structure.

Nathaniel Comfort, a science historian at Johns Hopkins University who early in his career worked as a writer at CSHL, is completing a biography of Watson, which he has been researching for more than a decade. The working title is American Icarus, a reference to hubris. “Watson was the most important and most famous scientist of the 20th century, and the most infamous of the 21st, and in both cases, the reason is due to his genetic determinism,” says Comfort, who says his subject was guilty of “overbelieving in the power of DNA.”

With Watson’s permission, I once obtained FBI files that largely focused on his political loyalties, because the White House was considering him for a job as a scientific adviser to then-President John F. Kennedy. Politically, Watson came out clean, but in the files his colleagues expressed mixed views of him. Some praised him as a “genius” who “has been to biology what Einstein was to the field of physics,” whereas others sharply critiqued his character, including one who said Watson had “a very strange personality and is obnoxious in a group in which he does not respect the intellectual level.” I ended up sharing the files with Comfort for his book.

I spoke with Comfort about Watson’s legacy. [Continue reading…]