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   and, using bases from within the cell, create two new DNA molecules from   
   one.   
      
   Eager to beat their chief rival, the American chemist Linus C. Pauling of   
   the California Institute of Technology, Dr. Watson and Mr. Crick wrote up   
   their discovery and hustled it into the journal Nature. Though their paper   
   was written in the typically flat tone of science and was barely a page   
   long, it was clear that its authors had realized that they were onto   
   something big.   
      
   Their proposed structure “has novel features which are of considerable   
   biological interest,” they wrote, adding, “It has not escaped our notice   
   that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a   
   possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.”   
      
   In other words, they could explain how genetic instructions could move   
   from one generation to the next.   
      
   In 1962, Dr. Watson, Dr. Wilkins and now Dr. Crick won the Nobel Prize for   
   the work. (Dr. Pauling, bested in the DNA race, won the 1962 Nobel Peace   
   Prize for his opposition to weapons of mass destruction; he had won the   
   prize in chemistry, in 1954, for his work on chemical bonds.)   
      
   If the Watson-Crick paper were published today, Dr. Franklin would almost   
   certainly be listed as a co-author because of the importance of her work   
   in the development of the double-helix structure, said Nancy Hopkins, a   
   molecular biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who   
   began working with Dr. Watson in the 1960s when she was an undergraduate   
   at Harvard.   
      
   But Dr. Franklin could not have shared the Nobel when it was awarded in   
   1962. She died of ovarian cancer in 1958, at 37, and the prize is not   
   given posthumously. (Nor is the prize ever shared by more than three   
   people.)   
      
   Today, Dr. Franklin is a heroine for feminists in science, who note that,   
   like most women at the time, she was underpaid, disrespected and often   
   denigrated by male colleagues. Over the years, Dr. Watson played down her   
   contribution, saying among other things that while her X-ray images were   
   good, she did not realize what she had.   
      
   Expressing attitudes retrograde even by the standards of the 1960s, Dr.   
   Watson famously described Dr. Franklin as a sexually repressed spinster   
   and an unimaginative researcher. He and Dr. Wilkins called her “Rosy,” a   
   nickname she did not use, but never to her face.   
      
   Ironically, “Jim Watson’s memoir made Rosalind Franklin famous,” said   
   Victor K. McElheny, a science writer whose biography, “Watson and DNA:   
   Making a Scientific Revolution,” was published in 2003. Interviewed for   
   this obituary in 2018, he said that Dr. Franklin and Dr. Wilkins had their   
   own papers in the same issue of Nature as the Watson-Crick bombshell. (Mr.   
   McElheny died in July.)   
      
   Dr. Wilkins, who continued researching DNA at King’s, died in 2004. Dr.   
   Crick eventually moved to the Salk Institute in La Jolla, Calif., where he   
   researched theoretical neurobiology and consciousness. He died in 2004.   
      
   Dr. Watson eventually moved from Cambridge, England, to Cambridge, Mass.,   
   where, in 1955, he accepted an appointment as assistant professor of   
   biology at Harvard.   
      
   He was an inspiring teacher, Dr. Hopkins recalled, though he had a   
   tendency to turn his back on his students and mumble into his blackboard.   
   “He was so much fun to be around,” she said. “But he was easily bored,   
   and   
   if he was bored he would turn and walk away in the middle of a sentence.”   
      
   Dr. Watson was an astute talent-spotter among his undergraduate and   
   graduate students, and he helped start notable research careers for more   
   than a few of them, including women like Dr. Hopkins. Fascinated by a   
   lecture he gave, she asked if she could work in his lab. He agreed,   
   beginning an association that ripened into enduring friendship.   
      
   She said he told her: “‘You should be a scientist. You have the kind of   
   mind I have, and you are just as smart as I am.’”   
      
   Over the years, he advised her on her graduate studies, she said. “Every   
   time I would get discouraged, I would go talk to him and he would say,   
   ‘No, you have to keep going.’”   
      
   Dr. Watson “recognized talent and supported it,” Dr. Stillman said. And,   
   he added, unlike many senior scientists, Dr. Watson did not insist on   
   putting his name on the papers of his graduate students or postdoctoral   
   researchers.   
      
   But Dr. Watson’s racist remarks had “overshadowed his support of women in   
   science,” Dr. Stillman said.   
      
   Unpopular at Harvard   
   Dr. Watson’s relations with the rest of the Harvard biology faculty were   
   fraught. He offended his departmental colleagues by dismissing evolution,   
   taxonomy, ecology and other biological research as “stamp collecting,”   
   saying those fields must give way to the study of molecules and cells.   
      
   “I found him the most unpleasant human being I had ever met,” one of his   
   young colleagues, the evolutionary biologist E.O. Wilson, wrote in a 1994   
   memoir, “Naturalist.”   
      
   It was Dr. Wilson who maintained that Dr. Watson, having achieved fame   
   with stunning work and at an early age, had become “the Caligula of   
   biology.”   
      
   “He was given license to say anything that came to his mind and expect to   
   be taken seriously,” Dr. Wilson wrote. “And unfortunately, he did so, with   
   a casual and brutal offhandedness.”   
      
   Then and later, Dr. Watson declared proudly that he was just speaking his   
   mind. He originally chose the title “Honest Jim” for the memoir that   
   became “The Double Helix.”   
      
   The book, written in a breezy style, was a “beautifully brash” and   
   “intensely personal” recounting of events leading up to one of the   
   greatest discoveries of biology, the sociologist of science Robert K.   
   Merton wrote on the cover of The New York Times Book Review.   
      
   “I know of nothing quite like it in all the literature about scientists at   
   work,” he wrote.   
      
   Dr. Crick’s initial reaction to the book was fury. He said Dr. Watson had   
   focused on himself to the detriment of others involved in the project.   
   (Dr. Hopkins said that the early versions of “The Double Helix” that Dr.   
   Watson had given her to read “were a lot more outrageous than what was   
   published.”)   
      
   Dr. Wilkins did not much like the book, either. He and Dr. Crick objected   
   so strenuously that Harvard University Press dropped its plans to publish   
   the work; it appeared instead in two installments in The Atlantic Monthly   
   and was later published by Atheneum.   
      
   The book was a best seller. An annotated version came out in 2012,   
   offering an even richer picture of the DNA triumph. And Dr. Crick   
   eventually got over his anger.   
      
   At Harvard, Dr. Watson also wrote “Molecular Biology of the Gene,” his   
   first in a series of notable textbooks. The book, now with co-authors in   
   later editions, remains one of the most influential, widely used and   
   admired texts in the history of biology.   
      
   Dr. Watson made his first visit to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, the   
   establishment he would eventually restore to scientific prominence, in   
   1948. He attended meetings there with fellow researchers on the genetics   
   of viruses that affect bacteria — bacteriophages, or phages — and over the   
   next few years these summer meetings were repeated, attracting more   
   researchers. Dr. Watson presented a paper there in 1953, just weeks after   
   he and Dr. Crick had published their double helix finding.   
      
   But by 1968 when he was recruited to lead it, the lab, located in a   
      
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