The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences finally published an obituary of J. D. Watson, who died in November of last year. (Nathanial Comfort has written a biography of Watson that will be a good complement to Matthew’s biography of Crick; Comfort’s book will be out at the end of this year or the beginning of 2027.) You can access the PNAS obituary for free by clicking on the screenshot below, which is a good summary of Watson’s accomplishments (and missteps) if you don’t want a book-length treatment.
Most laypeople, if they know Watson’s name, probably know just two things. First, he and Crick co-discovered the structure of DNA, one of the great findings of biology. Second, Watson was demonized, and fired as director of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories, for making racist comments. Both are true. Yes, Watson was a racist, as I discovered from talking to him for an hour and a half (see below), but he was also a brilliant scientist who did far more than just the DNA-structure stuff. The article describes some of his other accomplishments and I quote:
DNA was not the only structure that Watson solved at Cambridge. Using X-ray crystallography, Watson determined that the coat protein subunits of Tobacco Mosaic virus (TMV) were arranged helically around the viral RNA, although he could not detect the RNA (5). Two years later, Rosalind Franklin, now at Birkbeck College with J. D. Bernal, published the definitive study on the structure of TMV (6).
Watson left Cambridge in 1953 to take up a fellowship with Delbrück at the California Institute of Technology. He joined forces with Alex Rich in Pauling’s laboratory to work on the structure of RNA, but RNA gave fuzzy X-ray diffraction patterns and provided no clues as to what an RNA molecule might look like. Watson was not happy in Pasadena and, with the help of Paul Doty, was appointed an assistant professor in the Department of Biology at Harvard. However, he first spent a year in Cambridge, United Kingdom, before moving to Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Watson and Crick teamed up again to study the structure of small viruses and proposed that as a general principle, the outer protein coat of these viruses was built up of identical subunits. Franklin was also studying small viruses, and she and Watson exchanged letters, and she asked Watson and Crick to review drafts of her manuscripts.
At Harvard, Watson, his colleagues, and students made many important findings on ribosomes and protein synthesis, including demonstrating, concurrently with the team of Sydney Brenner, Francois Jacob, and Matt Meselson, the existence of messenger RNA. Watson’s contributions are not reflected in many of the publications from his Harvard laboratory. He did not add his name to papers unless he had made substantial contributions to them, thus ensuring that the credit went to those who had done the work. These papers included the discovery of the bacterial transcription protein, sigma factor, by Watson’s then graduate student Richard Burgess, along with Harvard Junior Fellow Richard Losick. At Harvard, Watson also promoted the careers of women, notably providing support for Nancy Hopkins, Joan Steitz, and Susan Gerbi. He also contributed to the split in the Department of Zoology due to his contempt for those working in the Department who were antireductionists.
In his last scientific paper (7), published in 1972, Watson returned to DNA. In considering the replication of linear DNA of T7 phage, he pointed out that the very ends of a linear DNA molecule cannot be replicated, the “end replication problem” which is solved in eukaryotes by telomeres. (Watson’s work was predated by Alexey Olovnikov who had published the same observation in 1971 in a Russian journal.)
Note the contributions Watson made, along with collaborators, at Harvard, and note as well that he did not put his name on publications unless he made “substantial contributions to them.” I did that, too, and I inherited that practice from my Ph.D. advisor Dick Lewontin, who inherited it from his Ph.D. advisor Theodosius Dobzhansky, who inherited it from his research supervisor at Columbia and Cal Tech, the Nobel Laureate T. H. Morgan. This is a good practice, and I never suffered from keeping my name off papers, for the granting agencies care only about which and how many papers come from an investigator’s funded lab, not how many his or her name is on. I’ll digress here to say that this practice has almost died out, as people now slap their name on paper for paltry reasons, like they contributed organisms or other material. The reason is the fierce competition for funding and credit.
Watson went on to write influential textbooks, trade books (notably The Double Helix) and headed up the Human Genome Project, from which he ultimately resigned. Finally, he ran the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, which he did very well until the racism scandal broke, rendering him ineffective.
Witkowski and Stillman don’t neglect the dark side of Watson:
In the late 1990s, Watson gave seminars, notably at the University of California Berkeley, where he expanded on research on the hormone POMC and related peptides and made inappropriate and incorrect observations about women. In October 2007, he made racist remarks about the intelligence of people of African descent, and, damagingly for his fellow employees at CSHL, stated that while he hoped that everyone was equal, “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true.” The CSHL Board of Trustees dissociated the institute from Watson’s comments, and he was forced to step down from his administrative position as Chancellor. The matter resurfaced in January 2019 when Watson was asked if his views on race and intelligence had changed. His answer was unequivocal: “No, not at all.” The Laboratory’s response was immediate, relieving him of all his emeritus titles. Watson and his family, however, continued to live on the CSHL campus.
They conclude this way:
Jim’s remarkable contributions to science and society will long endure—for the scientists using the human genome sequence, for students using Molecular Biology of the Gene and for readers of The Double Helix, and for reviving Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. He was a most amazing man.
Here’s a photo of Watson and me when he visited Chicago in 2013 to introduce the Watson Lectures that he endowed for our department. Do read the cool story about how those lectures came about in my post “Encounters with J. D. Watson“.
I worked at CSHL as a visiting scientist for about 2 years. Watson was the President of CSHL at the time, and we had a number of conversations.
Once, at a staff meeting, we were discussing the patenting of genes. Jim wanted to know what we thought about it. People were patenting biological processes, and in some cases, preventing others from working on them–obviously something that was very harmful to biomedical research. I remarked that, if there is a concept of “sin” today, patenting genes and other natural phenomena and processes, is certainly one of the most egregious examples. That resulted in Jim inviting me to cocktail parties at his home.
That’s a great picture of you and Watson.
Regarding names on papers, my advisor never put his name on the papers of his students unless he was substantially involved. His name appeared often enough without us, and he genuinely wanted his students to develop independent names for themselves. It seems that in today’s world, more is never enough.
Thanks for the link to the obit.
I have a couple of brain droppings to add. I read your original bit on him; you did mention his bigotry. But what I remembered most about your interaction with him was his answer to your question about his co-discovery of DNA structure and his atheism. I clicked on the link you gave above and this is what you wrote about his answer to your question about the role “atheism or naturalism” played in his discovery;
I like the idea that there has been done some big science that was partly motivated by a desire to find a natural explanation to replace a religious one. There is the schadenfreude aspect of it to see religious lies swept away by evidence, but that’s not really why I like the idea. I like it because it’s the kind of thinking that is the most successful; test all ideas, even – or especially- sacred ones. Keep only the ideas that work or are supported by the evidence. I have Dr Cobb’s Crick and I expect I’ll learn more about this when I read it (blastedly busy now).
But this is a question I’ve had for a long time. Not specifically about the folks who worked out the structure of DNA, but also of the folks who worked on foundational things; were they also motivated, in part* like Watson? In the early days most scientists were, like the rest of society, religious. For those who worked out the foundations of evolution, biology, physics, astronomy, etc which undermined religious explanations for the way things are, was there motive in their work to support their beliefs, contra Watson? If so, how did they reconcile when the evidence went against it?
My guess is most scientists then were either closet atheists (because, well, we all know why) and so there was no conflict or they were motived in part like Watson. My guess those who were religious were able to compartmentalize their minds in such a way that their scientific understanding was effectively walled off from the religious side of their psyche. In these people, quite numerous I’d guess, when a conflict arises between scientific fact and their beliefs, there is a demon, specifically, “Morton’s Demon” standing in that wall shouting “you shall not pass!” I’m thinking in modern times of people like Francis Collins.
Anyway, just some brain droppings.
*of course it’s only part of their motivation; they were scientists first.
In my book Faith versus Fact I show that scientists are far more atheistic than the average American (also true in the UK), and the better the scientist, the more atheistic she or he is. By the time you get to the National Academy, as I recall, about 95% of its members are atheists. I go into a few explanations for that.
I remember that bit in Faith v Fact.
On EdwardM’s brain droppings – I doubt many scientists are interested in “disproving” religion as a passion, more like they just rarely consider it at all.
The religious ones interest me the most, in all highly intelligent people, not just scientists. In Islam that kind of knowledge can be “shirk” (innovation) and explicitly Haram in many cases.
Less so in Judaism and Christianity, though I’ve noticed that many of those that are actually religious have had some terrible upbringings, childhood experiences, etc. that effected them for the rest of their lives.
D.A.
NYC
But was it necessarily bigotry? Might he have seen himself as making a best-efforts and good-faith evaluation of the evidence, and following that evidence, even if it leads to an unpopular and heretical conclusion?
If the reply would be along the lines that, no, the evidence showing he was wrong is so available and clear cut that no good-faith scientist could arrive at his conclusions, so it must have been bigotry, then could someone do the world a favour and point everyone at the available and clear-cut evidence showing he was wrong? (Note that the various denunciations of him don’t actually do that, they just denounce him.)
[Edit: oops, that was supposed to be a reply to EdwardM.]
Thanks for this post, PCC(e). Watson’s lab was a strong influence on the sub-field of gene expression, particularly in regard to protein synthesis. His doctoral students and post-docs included many who became major figures, including Mario Capecchi, Peter Moore, Charles Kurland, Bob Horvitz (Nobel 2002), Ron Davis, and Rich Roberts and Phil Sharp (both Nobel 1993, for introns). He had the reputation of being a terrific mentor for students and post-docs.