James Dewey Watson 1928 - 2025

Along with Rosalind Franklin and Francis Crick, James Watson discovered the structure of DNA. Watson had been an enthusiastic amateur zoologist and a gifted student - he enrolled at the University of Chicago at the age of 15 to study zoology. However, his attention turned from zoology to genetics, and as a postgraduate student Watson joined the research group of Salvador Luria (1912-91), an important microbiologist and later a Nobel Prize winner.

Watson met Francis Crick at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, where he worked from 1951 until 1953. At Cambridge, the two researchers used X-ray diffraction studies by Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins to establish the double-helix model of the molecular structure of DNA. In 1962 Watson, Crick and Wilkins received the Nobel Prize in Medicine for this discovery. From 1968 to 2007, Watson was the Director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in the United States.

Watson expressed a number of racist views related to the genetic characteristics of different ethnicities, including repeated assertions that black people are less intelligent than white people. He apologized for his comments, but lost nearly all of his remaining academic affiliations as a result of these views, and retired soon after.