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{shortcode-8c0dd475ea3269f67b1a4d37d27db5cc232a1fc2}hen James “Jim” D. Watson helped discover the structure of DNA at age 25, he earned the 1962 Nobel Prize in Medicine and gained renown as a scientific wunderkind. He would go on to spend much of his long career at Harvard, where he would leave behind a prominent scientific legacy and a complex, at times strained relationship to the institution.

Watson was 97 when he died last Thursday in hospice care on Long Island.

Watson is best known for his contributions to the discovery of DNA structure. At age 25, he and Cambridge-based researcher Francis H.C. Crick used data from chemist and x-ray crystallographer Rosalind E. Franklin and Maurice H.F. Wilkins to describe the molecule’s well-known double-helix structure, a foundation of modern life sciences research.

“It really provided the beginnings of molecular genetics that has revolutionized our understanding of biology,” Harvard Neuroscience professor John E. Dowling ’57 said. “The Watson and Crick model began — and has been — the basis for all of these developments in molecular biology.”

Watson spent 21 years as a professor at Harvard, where he would build up the molecular biology program and mentor dozens of graduate students even as he clashed with a president, a dean, and many of his colleagues.

After leaving Harvard in 1976, Watson became the director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, transforming the financially endangered institution into a hub of scientific innovation.

But Watson’s career would be undone by his growing record of racist and sexist claims. In 2007, CHSL stripped Watson of his administrative duties, following comments published in a British newspaper implying that he believed Black people were intellectually inferior to white people. When he repeated the claims in a 2019 PBS interview, CHSL removed his honorary titles as well.

Watson is survived by his wife Elizabeth V.L. Watson ’69 and sons Rufus R. Watson and Duncan J. Watson.

Watson’s Lab

Watson was born in Chicago, Illinois, to Jean M. Watson and James D. Watson, a businessman. He stayed there until he graduated from the University of Chicago with a zoology degree in 1947.

After completing his Ph.D. in zoology at Indiana University Bloomington in 1950, Watson found his way to Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, where he completed his groundbreaking research with Crick.

Watson arrived at Harvard in 1955 after being recruited for his work in genetic material and became a full professor in 1961. He ultimately spent more than two decades at Harvard, where his laboratory was located on the third floor of the Biological Laboratories on Divinity Avenue.

While at Harvard, Watson was respected as an accomplished scientist — and the kind of person who could help build a department into a formidable scientific institution, though he would not be loved by all his colleagues. He fostered an intense, close culture in his lab.

According to Molecular and Cellular Biology professor emeritus Richard M. Losick, Watson was the catalyst that turned the third floor of BioLabs into an incubator for Nobel prizes. Since Watson arrived, 10 Nobel laureates have trained or worked on the floor.

“There was a community, and to be there, I can’t even tell you — it was ridiculous,” MIT professor Nancy H. Hopkins ’64 said. “Just day by day, there were days when you just didn’t want to go home, because it was so exciting.”

“It was an era when, you know, every year, year and a half or two, somebody who knew was going to win a Nobel Prize,” she added.

“I was lucky enough to be in and near this remarkable community. It was really quite special,” Losick said. “So, that was a period. It’s over now, but I attribute it to Watson’s influence in creating this culture, community of students, and young colleagues.”

Watson’s doctoral student Joan A. Steitz, now a molecular biophysics professor at Yale University, was the first woman graduate student to join his Harvard lab. In an interview, Steitz said Watson believed that collaboration was the best way to solve thorny scientific problems.

“The thing Jim believed in is communication,” Steitz said. “He just understood basically and fully how important communication is to the progress of science.”

“We had tea every day at about four,” fellow Watson doctoral student Peter B. Moore, now a chemistry professor at Yale, said. “It made everybody get together and chat, and the chat would be some social, some scientific, and so forth. It helped a lot with a sort of group cohesion.”

In addition to daily teas, Watson hosted gatherings with scientists from different Boston institutions in his lab once a week. “Everybody” in the lab was invited to the meetings, according to Steitz. Even for graduate students and technicians, she said, the conversations were “part of their training.”

While it is common practice for principal investigators to put their names on all research papers produced in their lab, Watson often elected not to add his name to studies by his students, according to Steitz.

“He did not put his name on papers just because the work came from his lab,” Steitz said. “He put the names of people who had actually done the work on the papers he was very much involved in. ”

Watson, Losick said, cared about the success of his students. But he wasn’t always easy to work with: Losick described his personality as “brilliant, undiplomatic, intense.”

In Watson’s lab, “you had to have a thick skin and not worry about being criticized if someone challenged you when you present on your work,” Losick said.

‘An Unusual Mind’

During his time at Harvard, Watson often sparred with other faculty in the Biology department and sometimes found quarrels with top administrators. Evolutionary biologist E.O. Wilson, who went up for tenure at the same time as Watson, famously called Watson the “Caligula of biology,” describing him in a memoir as unpleasant and sometimes callous.

Sometimes Watson’s disputes were scientific in nature. Watson, who trained as a zoologist in the days when that was the standard path to a career in genetics, was a pioneer in molecular biology — but he could be swift to dismiss organismal biologists.

“Jim was at odds with the Biology department because he represented the new biology,” said Harvard biology professor emeritus Walter Gilbert ’53, who co-led the Watson-Gilbert Laboratory.

Dowling said many junior faculty stopped going to Biology department faculty meetings during Watson’s time at Harvard because of how “contentious” they became as a result of his “belittling” of the organismal biologists.

When Watson was recruited to lead the CSHL in 1968, he initially tried to hold the position alongside his Harvard post. But Faculty of Arts and Sciences Dean Henry A. Rosovsky refused to let Watson hold simultaneous appointments at the two institutions, and Watson eventually resigned from Harvard in 1976. He dedicated much of the rest of his career to the overhaul of CSHL, turning the failing laboratory into the home of eight Nobel prize winners.

Watson’s publication of his memoir on the discovery of DNA’s structure, The Double Helix, also set off a clash with Harvard’s top brass. Wilkins and Crick felt the book shortchanged their work, and Harvard University Press decided against publishing it after then-Harvard President Nathan M. Pusey, Class of 1928, stepped in.

Backed by the Harvard Corporation, the University’s highest governing body, Pusey stood behind his veto, saying that publishing the work would have meant “taking sides in a controversy among scientists.”

Shirley M. Tilghman, the first female president of Princeton University and a former Corporation fellow, served with Watson on committees relating to the Human Genome Research project, which Watson led in the late 1980s and early 1990s. She, like many others, remembers Watson as an “eccentric” personality.

“I think all of us who knew him recognized that Jim had an unusual mind,” said Tilghman.

“That he would make an outrageous comment — it doesn’t in the slightest, astonish me,” said Moore, Watson’s former Ph.D. student. “He would often make comments wanting to get a reaction.”

When Watson arrived at Harvard in the mid-1950s, he was unmarried. In these years, Gilbert says, his wife Celia Gilbert prepared meals for Watson and other “wandering bachelors” regularly. Watson pursued multiple Radcliffe students during this time.

“Jim adored having women around,” Steitz said. “During the summertime, he would hire a whole bevy of Radcliffe undergraduates to come work in the lab.”

In 1968, Watson married Elizabeth Lewis, then a junior at Radcliffe, in California. He informed friends of their union by postcard.

A Fall From Grace

Many of Watson’s colleagues and students remember him as someone who would make startling comments without thinking, or else as a deliberate provocation. In 2007, that pattern caught up with him.

Watson told a Sunday Times reporter that year that he was “inherently gloomy” regarding the “prospect of Africa.” He continued, saying “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours — whereas all the testing says not really.”

Watson wrote that he hoped everyone was equal, but that “people who have to deal with black employees find this is not true.”

When a PBS episode of “American Masters” focused on Watson aired in 2019, the scientist had not budged on his earlier claims. Asked whether he had changed his perspective on intelligence and race, he said, “Not at all.”

“I would like for them to have changed, that there be new knowledge that says that your nurture is much more important than nature,” Watson said. “But I haven’t seen any knowledge.”

He lost his titles at Cold Spring Harbor Lab just days later. The research center cited his comments, describing them as “unsubstantiated and reckless.” Shortly after, Harvard removed Watson’s plaque from the BioLabs.

To some of the people who had known Watson throughout his career, the remarks were startling and disturbing.

“It’s really befuddling,” Losick said. “One of the points I make is that people are complicated, and sometimes they have good sides and bad sides, and maybe they excel in one domain, but it doesn’t mean that they don’t do regrettable things in other areas of life or profession.”

Losick said he found Watson’s remarks “despicable,” but recalled being one of the few to fight for the plaque to stay in BioLabs. He said Watson’s tenure at Harvard was an important chapter within the University’s history and inspired young scholars to pursue molecular biology.

“It breaks my heart that there’s no record of it anymore,” he said. “You don’t erase history, you add to it.”

“I mean, it’s not science. And the thing about it is that Jim was first and foremost a scientist,” Hopkins said. “That’s what’s so uncharacteristic.”

Tilghman said she was saddened to watch as Watson “undermined” his own scientific reputation.

“As Jim aged, his regulator over what he would say in both in public and in private deteriorated, and he began saying truly outrageous things that no one could possibly agree with about women, about race,” Tilghman said.

Toward the end of his career, Watson made overtly antisemitic and racist comments, and his longer history of sexist comments began to tarnish his image as well. In his 1968 memoir, The Double Helix, Watson criticized Franklin personality and appearance in condescending terms, writing that she “by choice did not emphasize her feminine qualities.”

Hopkins, the MIT biologist who was Watson’s Ph.D. student, said she thought of Watson as a key mentor in her own scientific career and a champion of women in science — though his record was checkered. She recalled that Watson ran his first drafts of the memoir by her, but she was too young at the time to fully grasp the implications of the passages on Franklin.

“I took it at face value, and then he said to me ‘I published this book, feminists are going to criticize me for the way we treated Rosalind Franklin — that this is how we saw her,’” Hopkins said. “And he’s absolutely right. That was the culture of the time.”

After re-reading later, Hopkins remembers thinking, “Oh, my god, this poor woman. This is what happened to all women who have tried to go into science.”

In the later decades of his career, Watson’s DNA research became personal: He hoped to help find treatments for one of his sons, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia.

Watson sold his Nobel medal in 2014, citing financial need — but the Russian businessman who bought the prize from Watson for more than $4 million returned it to him. Watson donated much of the proceeds from the sale to multiple laboratories and educational institutions, while keeping some for his family.

“I do see it as a tragedy — this man who will go down in history, for sure, as one of the greatest scientists of the 20th century had to end his career in this, I think, diminished way,” Tilghman said. “For me, it’s a tragedy.”

–Staff writer Abigail S. Gerstein can be reached at abigail.gerstein@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @abbysgerstein.

—Staff writer Ella F. Niederhelman can be reached at ella.niederhelman@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @eniederhelman.