James Dewey Watson was twenty-four, and newly arrived at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, when he and Francis Crick built their model of DNA in the spring of 1953. Trained as a zoologist at Chicago and Indiana, he had crossed the Atlantic convinced that the gene was a molecule whose structure could be solved.
The double helix made him famous at twenty-five and a Nobel laureate at thirty-four. His 1968 memoir, The Double Helix, fixed the legend, including its dismissive treatment of Rosalind Franklin. He later led Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and helped launch the Human Genome Project, and died in 2025, his scientific stature long shadowed by widely condemned remarks on race.