Obituary: James Watson

James Watson, the co-discoverer of the DNA double helix structure, has died at the age of 97.

University of Cambridge scientists James Watson and Francis Crick, alongside King's College London scientists Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin, discovered the double-helix structure of DNA in 1953. Watson, along with Crick and Wilkins, received the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 1962 for their contribution to the field of genetics. Franklin had died from ovarian cancer in 1958 and Nobel prizes are not awarded posthumously.

'The elucidation of the structure of the double helix goes down, along with Mendel and Darwin, as the three greatest discoveries in biology,' said Professor Bruce Stillman, president of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, where Watson spent most of his working life.

Watson was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1928. He received a Zoology BSc degree from the University of Chicago in 1947 and a PhD, also in Zoology, from Indiana University in 1950. Watson went on to work as a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and in October 1951, he moved to the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, where he met Crick. In the spring of 1953, Watson and Crick described the double-helix structure of DNA, publishing their research in a seminal paper in Nature. They concluded that DNA was helical, relying on Franklin's experimental data to confirm their theory.

Speaking previously on the Today programme, Watson explained: 'We thought it was a beautiful molecule.... I think Francis got it correctly. I saw it as a combination of genetic thinking and he saw it as the start of a new era, and he was right'.

Watson played a foundational role in the early stages of the Human Genome Project. As the first director, he lead the planning of the project from 1988 until 1992, which included its official launch in 1990. The project aimed to sequence the DNA base-pairs that make up the human genome, and was declared complete on 14 April 2003. However, about eight percent of the human genome, including the centromeres located at the middle of the chromosome, remained un-sequenced until 2022 (see BioNews 1140 and 1098).

Explaining the context of the double helix structure, Professor Robin Lovell Badge told the Today programme: 'The structure basically explains how inheritance works, how we work, how all life forms with DNA – which is the vast majority – work. It was an amazing discovery.'

Watson is survived by his wife, Elizabeth, their sons, Rufus and Duncan, and a grandson.