James Dewey Watson was born in Chicago on April 6, 1928. At just 15 years old, he entered college as part of an experimental scholarship program for young talents. His interest in birds from a very young age led him to study Zoology, a career that ended in 1947, after which he turned to genetics.
The fault that Watson fell in love with the gene was the Nobel Prize in Physics Erwin Schrödinger, who a few years earlier had given a series of public lectures at Trinity College in Dublin. The theme chosen was unusual for a physicist: “What is life?” These lectures became a book of the same name. A book that introduced one of the ideas that changed our outlook on life forever. Schrödinger argued that life could be viewed in terms of biological information storage , suggesting that genes, and not proteins – as was believed at the time – were the hereditary material. This had an enormous influence on those who would ultimately be the main actors in the great molecular biology play, including Watson.
After being rejected at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and Harvard, Watson obtained a scholarship for his graduate studies at the University of Indiana, where he received his doctorate in 1950 for his work on the effects of X-rays on the replication of bacteriophage viruses, under the direction of the Italian Salvador Luria. From Indiana, Watson moved to Copenhagen, where, much to his regret, he continued his research with phages, something that did not interest him as much as the essence of life.
In the spring of 1951, he met the Englishman Maurice Wilkins at a conference. Wilkins was a physicist who had participated in the Manhattan Project during World War II and had been deeply disillusioned with science in the aftermath of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bomb disasters. But he also read Schrödinger’s book and turned to biology, specifically, he made the first attempts to use X-ray diffraction to photograph DNA molecules. Watson, excited by Wilkins’ results, moved to England in the autumn of that same year and began work at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, where he met Francis Crick, another former physicist in love with DNA.
The success of the double helix
Watson and Crick decided to use model building to try to discern the molecular structure of DNA . During his first attempts, the great news came from the other side of the Atlantic of the demonstration that DNA was the hereditary material. From that point on, Watson and Crick became convinced that understanding molecular geometry would be critical to discovering how genetic information could be transmitted from parental cells to daughters . It would be a major scientific breakthrough, and they also knew that they were competing with other scientists, including the most famous chemist of the day, Linus Pauling.
At first they had difficulties in the construction of the model since neither of them had extensive knowledge of chemistry. Initially they built a three-stranded helix with the nitrogenous bases on the outside of the structure. When the model was released to colleagues, Rosalind Franklin, a physical chemistry specialist at neighboring King’s College, was scathing in her criticism. In addition, Franklin was reluctant to build models without first gathering more comprehensive information on X-ray diffraction . Embarrassed by this public failure, the director of the Cavendish laboratory told Watson and Crick to abandon their model-building efforts and return to other research, but they continued to think privately about the DNA problem.
Wilkins and Franklin, who worked together, were having some conflicts. She, to avoid disappointment at King’s, had decided to move. It is not clear how Wilkins came into possession of one of the best X-ray images of the DNA molecule obtained by Franklin, but when he showed it to Watson, he was clear: the cross could only arise from a helical structure, it was a double helix.
Watson and Crick used this new information to build a new model with the paired nitrogenous bases, A with T and C with G, in the center of the molecule. This pairing immediately suggested to Crick that one strand of the molecule could serve as a template to exactly replicate DNA sequences and thus transmit genetic information during cell reproduction. It was a turning point in science, as it radically changed the conception of life, ushering in the modern era of biology.
Later and controversial works
This successful model was unveiled in February 1951. And in April 1953 it was published in the journal Nature , with its presentation for the Nobel Prize in 1962. This was shared between Watson, Crick and Wilkins. The regulation states that it must be awarded to no more than three living scientists, so Franklin, who had died of ovarian cancer in 1958, could not be part of that success to which he also contributed .
Watson went on to work with many groups throughout the 1950s, including where he had previously been rejected, Caltech and Harvard. It seems that his genius came from his ability to coordinate the work of different individuals and combine his results into new conclusions . So until he finished at Harvard University, where he began researching RNA and protein synthesis. In 1968, he published “The Double Helix “, a somewhat sensational account of the discovery of DNA. In it, Watson uses disparaging comments and spiteful personal descriptions from many people involved in the discovery, especially Rosalind Franklin . Despite the reluctance of Harvard Press to print it, it was published and was a great commercial success. In 1998 it was chosen in the 7th position in the list of the 100 best non-fiction books of the 20th century.
In 1968, Watson became the director of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. At the time, the institution was struggling financially, but Watson proved to be very good at raising funds for research and under his direction it became one of the world’s leading institutions for molecular biology.
In 1990, Watson was appointed director of the Human Genome Project and again used his vision for fundraising to pilot the project until 1992, when he resigned over a patent dispute. Watson believed that these would only hamper the pure research being conducted by the project scientists.
His stay at Cold Spring Harbor ended abruptly in 2007. On October 14 of that year, on his way to a conference in London, he was asked about the state of the world, replying that Africa’s progress had been hampered by inferior genetic material. A public outcry prompted his resignation .
Despite this public setback, Watson continues to make controversial statements today : At a meeting organized in Seattle by the Allen Institute for Brain Science in September 2013, he announced his belief that the increase in diagnosed inherited disorders could be due to because parents have children later and later. In 2014, she decided to auction her Nobel Prize medal due to decreased income after the 2007 incident. The sum paid for her amounted to $ 4.1 million, with which Watson intended to support scientific research. It was later returned to him by the same buyer, Russian magnate Alisher Usmanov, who claimed that Watson deserved the medal and that it was unacceptable that he was forced to sell it.
