Some last-minute news from Greg: J. D. Watson has crossed the rainbow bridge to join Francis Crick. He had long innings, though. Click on NYT screenshot below, or find the article archived here for free.
I hardly need to say much about Watson, as I think most readers know about his achievements, his book The Double Helix, and his late-in-life cancellation for racism. I’ll have a few words to say about him tomorrow, along with a cute story recounting what happened when he visited our department on Alumni Day. Here’s a photo of me chatting with him in our seminar room twelve years ago:
A legend, often controversial, now gone.
Wow – that photo … it’s really him …
I saw him talk once, but one-to-one is no comparison – must have been surreal….
97…. wow…
Your post inspired me to go to the NYT and read his obituary. Brilliant, complex, and difficult man. I followed the genome mapping project in the news, but did not make the connection with Watson at that time.
I just saw that Watson had died -looking forward to our host’s anecdote. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn8xdypnz32o
Always jelly of PCC(E) – he gets to meet all the big shots. Watson would have been a fascinating conversation I bet.
D.A.
NYC
RIP.
I wonder how Fisher, Haldane, and Wright reacted to the discovery of the double helix. I didn’t find anything about it online but Watson would probably be one of the few people who knew it.
I started reading on molecular biology in 2015, read his memoir and later (2020) “The Eighth Day of Creation”. I suspect his “racist” comments were taken out of context. I have been called a racist at least twice in public related to my service at http://www.northerstern.edu. an easy ad hominem to sling around.
Wiki notes the very distinguished list of some of Jim Watson’s Harvard PhD students and post-docs, including two of the latter who later discovered introns (1993 Nobel Prize). My friend Charles Kurland, one of Watson’s grad students who became a very significant molecular biologist in Sweden, asserts that Watson was a terrific PhD supervisor.