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   onetime whaling port on the North Shore of Long Island, had faded from   
   prominence. Dr. Watson more or less abandoned hands-on research to turn   
   that situation around. With a knack for administration and fund-raising,   
   he set the lab’s focus on microbiology aimed at understanding, diagnosing   
   and treating the genetics of cancer. It was a prescient choice: In 1971,   
   President Richard M. Nixon declared “war” on cancer. “And hence there was   
   considerable funding,” Dr. Stillman said.   
      
   Dr. Watson also built up the lab’s educational offerings, established a   
   graduate program, expanded its array of conferences and created a program   
   for high school students studying DNA. That program is now “the largest   
   high school laboratory program in genetics and biology in the world,” Dr.   
   Stillman said last year.   
      
   And when researchers began to realize that it would be possible to   
   decipher the entire sequence of genes in the human genome, Dr. Watson   
   called them to a meeting at Cold Spring Harbor to discuss it. When the   
   federal government established the Human Genome Project, it turned to Dr.   
   Watson to be its first leader.   
      
   He recruited leading scientists and set the project’s agenda. For one   
   thing, he proposed that it should first work on model organisms like the   
   roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans, on the theory that this research would   
   pay dividends down the line. It did.   
      
   He also said that the project should be an international project, with   
   researchers from other countries, and that the American government effort   
   should be run by the National Institutes of Health. And he insisted that 3   
   percent of its budget go to the study of the project’s social, moral and   
   ethical implications. (That figure was later raised to 5 percent.)   
      
   A “working draft” was concluded in 2000 with a list of three billion   
   letters in the human genetic code. It was hailed on June 26 in televised   
   announcements by President Bill Clinton from the White House and Prime   
   Minister Tony Blair at 10 Downing Street. Three years later, scientists   
   announced the project officially over.   
      
   Dr. Watson had left the project in 1992 in a dispute over the patenting of   
   genes, an idea that was backed by the Bush administration but was one that   
   he despised. He was vindicated, in a way, in 2013, when the United States   
   Supreme Court ruled that the discovery of a natural product, like a gene,   
   did not warrant a patent — though the creation of new products from   
   natural substances might.   
      
   “He was fundamentally opposed to the blueprint of life being patented,”   
   Dr. Stillman said. “His view has held up.”   
      
   Son of a Debt Collector   
   James Dewey Watson was born in Chicago on April 6, 1928, one of two   
   children of James Dewey Watson, a debt collector for La Salle Extension   
   University, a correspondence school based in Chicago, and the former Jean   
   Mitchell, who worked in the University of Chicago admissions office and   
   was active in Democratic Party politics.   
      
   James grew up on the South Side of Chicago and attended South Shore High   
   School. A precocious student, he was a contestant on the 1940s radio   
   series “Quiz Kids,” broadcast from Chicago. At 15, he enrolled in the   
   University of Chicago, and it was there that he encountered a book about   
   biology, written for a lay audience by the quantum physicist Erwin   
   Schrödinger. The book, “What Is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living   
   Cell,” convinced the young Watson that genes were the key component of   
   living cells.   
      
   After graduating in 1947, he went on to graduate school at Indiana   
   University, where he encountered two giants in the field, Hermann J.   
   Muller and Salvador E. Luria. (Dr. Muller won the Nobel Prize in   
   Physiology or Medicine in 1946, and Dr. Luria was similarly honored in   
   1969.)   
      
   Under Dr. Luria’s guidance, Dr. Watson received his doctorate in 1950. He   
   then headed for Cambridge and fame.   
      
   Six-foot-two, gangly and perennially rumpled, Dr. Watson fit right in at   
   the quarters he shared with Mr. Crick at the Cavendish Laboratory, an   
   amenity-free premises known as “The Hut.” Decades later, his disheveled   
   hair gray and thinning, he still walked with a lurching gait, often   
   veering awkwardly off his path when someone or something attracted his   
   attention.   
      
   As a young man he bemoaned his single status and made no bones about the   
   fact that he was in search of a wife. His search ended in 1968, when,   
   about to turn 40, he married Elizabeth Lewis, a 19-year-old sophomore of   
   Radcliffe College at Harvard. They had two sons, Rufus and Duncan. In a   
   2003 interview with The Guardian, Dr. Watson described Rufus’s severe   
   mental illness, which he called a “genetic injustice.”   
      
   He often said that his son’s illness had been “a big incentive” for him   
   to   
   join the genome project.   
      
   His wife, an architectural preservationist, his sons and one grandson   
   survive him.   
      
   Over the years Dr. Watson acquired a reputation for challenging scientific   
   orthodoxy and for brash, unpleasant and even bigoted outspokenness. At one   
   time or another he was quoted as disparaging gay men and women, girls who   
   were not “pretty” and the intelligence and initiative generally of women,   
   as well as of people with dark skin. At a lecture at Berkeley in 2000, he   
   suggested a connection between exposure to sunlight and sex drive, saying   
   it would explain why there are Latin lovers but not English lovers. And he   
   once said that he felt bad whenever he interviewed an overweight job   
   applicant because he knew he wasn’t going to hire someone who was fat.   
      
   Dr. Watson escaped serious consequences for his remarks until 2007, when   
   he was traveling to promote his memoir “Avoid Boring People: Lessons From   
   a Life in Science,” published that year. He was quoted in The Sunday Times   
   as saying that while “there are many people of color who are very   
   talented,” he was “inherently gloomy about the prospects of Africa.”   
      
   Social policies assume comparable intelligence levels, he went on,   
   “whereas the testing says not really.”   
      
   The remarks provoked widespread outrage, but they stung particularly at   
   the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, which early on had become known as a   
   leader in eugenics, a theory supposedly aimed at improving the genetic   
   quality of the human race through selective breeding. Today, eugenics is   
   recognized as a racist enterprise that gave rise to, among other things,   
   forced sterilization, restrictions on immigration and, in its ultimate   
   horror in Nazi Germany, the Holocaust.   
      
   “Jim has made some very silly comments in his life,” Dr. Stillman said.   
   “Perhaps those are the worst.”   
      
   Though Dr. Watson immediately apologized “unreservedly,” saying “there is   
   no scientific basis for such a belief,” his remarks produced a swirl of   
   denunciations and canceled speaking engagements. Within a week, he had   
   resigned as chancellor of the laboratory.   
      
   For Sale: A Nobel Medal   
   In 2014, Dr. Watson put his Nobel medal up for auction at Christie’s,   
   saying he would use the proceeds of the sale to provide for his family and   
   support scientific research. But there was some speculation that the sale   
   was a gesture of defiance directed at a scientific community that he felt   
   had abandoned him.   
      
   A Russian billionaire, Alisher Usmanov, bought the medal for $4.1 million   
   — and returned it to him.   
      
   In 2007, Dr. Watson became the second person to have his full genome   
      
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