Molecular biologist James Watson helped reveal DNA’s hidden form
Everett Assortment Historic / Alamy Inventory Photograph
James Watson, one of many discoverers of the construction of DNA, has died in a New York hospice facility on the age of 97. Together with fellow researchers Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins, he gained the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Drugs for the invention of DNA’s double helix form, which laid the groundwork for innumerable improvements all through the sphere of biology.
After that revolutionary discovery, Watson went on to function the director, president and chancellor of Chilly Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York. Underneath his route, the laboratory expanded considerably, changing into a world chief in molecular biology. He was additionally the pinnacle of the Human Genome Challenge for 2 years earlier than stepping down in protest of strikes in direction of patenting gene sequences.
Regardless of all this, Watson advised New Scientist in 2007 that he considered the books he authored as his largest accomplishment, saying: “The double helix was going to be discovered by somebody. I speeded it up slightly. However Francis Crick by no means would have written The Double Helix, nor would any of the opposite scientists concerned.” Watson mentioned on the time that he hoped his writing would encourage extra younger folks to enter science.
He confronted quite a lot of controversy all through his profession. The very discovery of the construction of DNA was enabled by X-ray pictures taken by one other researcher, Rosalind Franklin, whose work was not acknowledged within the 1953 paper that gained Watson and Crick their Nobel prize, and Watson was criticised for downplaying her contributions. He was famously dismissive of different fields of biology, and steadily confronted condemnation and even skilled censure for feedback about each different researchers and marginalised teams on the whole, which by 2007 led to his retirement from Chilly Spring Harbor.
Regardless of his many controversies, his educational accomplishments place him as one of the necessary scientists of the twentieth century. His work opened the door to completely new fields of examine, bringing us insights on how hereditary info is saved, the relationships between species throughout the tree of life and new methods to deal with genetic illnesses.
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