“The laws of inheritance are quite unknown,” Charles Darwin acknowledged in 1859. The discovery of DNA’s shape altered how we conceived of life itself. The X-ray crystallography by Rosalind Franklin ...

James Dewey Watson, who died on Nov 6, was one of the most famous names in modern science. He was an American biologist best known for discovering the double-helix structure of DNA, the molecule that ...

Francis Crick missed a crucial seminar in 1951, probably because he was seeing a lover. James Watson did go, failed to take notes and misremembered key details. As a result, their first model of DNA ...

IN FEBRUARY 1953, after five weeks of intense work, Francis Crick (pictured) and James Watson solved one of biology’s most fundamental puzzles: the structure of DNA. Their discovery—the double ...

Molecular Biologist Dr. James Watson attends the 10th Anniversary Sing For Hope Gala at Tribeca Rooftop on October 24, 2016 in New York City. Editor at Large There’s no telling how the history of ...

How do we reckon with the legacy of people who have done excellent work, but who have said or done terrible things? Last week, James Watson died at the age of 97. Watson’s scientific work was ...

James D. Watson, whose co-discovery of the twisted-ladder structure of DNA in 1953 helped light the long fuse on a revolution in medicine, crimefighting, genealogy and ethics, has died. He was 97. The ...

On a foggy Saturday morning in 1953, a tall, skinny 24-year-old man fiddled with shapes he had cut out of cardboard. They represented fragments of a DNA molecule, and young James Watson was trying to ...

In “Crick: A Mind in Motion,” the British biologist Matthew Cobb provides a biography both vivid and authoritative. By Janice P. Nimura Janice P. Nimura is the author of “The Doctors Blackwell,” a ...