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 figure how they fit together in a way that let DNA do its job as the stuff of genes.Suddenly, he realized that they joined together to form the “rungs” of a long, twisted ladder, a shape better known nowadays as a double helix.His first reaction: “It’s so beautiful.”AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementBut it was more than that. Discovering the structure of deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, was a breakthrough that would help open the way to a revolution in medicine, biology and other fields as diverse as crime-fighting, genealogy and ethics.Watson died Thursday, according to his former research lab. The Chicago-born scientist was 97 years old. His career was marked by significant achievements, including his role in mapping the human genome. However, his legacy is complicated by controversial remarks on race, which led to his condemnation and loss of honorary titles.Figuring out the double helix “goes down as one of the three most important discoveries in the history of biology,” alongside Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection and Gregor Mendel’s fundamental laws of genetics, said Bruce Stillman, president of the Cold Spring Harbor lab, on Friday.Watson shared the Nobel Prize with collaborator Francis Crick and scientist Maurice Wilkins. They were aided by X-ray research by colleague Rosalind Franklin and her graduate student Raymond Gosling. Watson was later criticized for a disparaging portrayal of Franklin in his book “The Double Helix,” and today she is considered a prominent example of a female scientist whose contributions were overlooked.AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementBoth of his Nobel co-winners, Crick and Wilkins, died in 2004. Franklin died in 1958.Their discovery instantly suggested how hereditary information is stored and how a cell duplicates its DNA before dividing so that each resulting cell inherits a copy. The duplication begins with the two strands of DNA pulling apart like a zipper.“Francis Crick and I made the disc …
