James D. Watson, the brilliant but controversial American biologist whose 1953 discovery of the structure of DNA, the molecule of heredity, ushered in the age of genetics and provided the foundation ...

Jan Witkowski is the former executive director of the Banbury Center at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, and an editor, with Alex Gann, of The Annotated and Illustrated Double Helix. James D. Watson was ...

James Dewey Watson, a molecular biologist whose work helped decode the structure of DNA, died on November 6, 2025, at a hospice in East Northport, N.Y. He was 97 years old. Watson was best known for ...

James Watson, who co-discovered the double-helix structure of DNA in 1953, has died at age 97. Born in Chicago in 1928, Watson made the groundbreaking discovery at just 24 years old alongside British ...

His decoding of the blueprint for life with Francis H.C. Crick made him one of the most important scientists of the 20th century. He wrote a celebrated memoir and later ignited an uproar with racist ...