[continued from previous message]   
      
   sequenced. The first was J. Craig Venter, who as president of the Celera   
   Corporation started a human genome sequencing project originally in   
   competition with the government effort. Both men made their genomes   
   available to researchers.   
      
   Today, commercial concerns sell sequencing efforts to the public. And the   
   double helix has entered popular culture. Its image has appeared on   
   commercial products ranging from jewelry to perfume and on postage stamps   
   issued by countries as various as Gabon and Monaco. Salvador Dalí   
   incorporated the image in a painting, and the performance artists who make   
   up Blue Man Group use the image in their shows.   
      
   It has also been reproduced in countless publications, often twisting the   
   wrong way — an error so common that researchers have built web pages about   
   it.   
      
   Dr. Watson was once quoted as saying that he should be played in the   
   movies by John McEnroe, the international bad boy of tennis, but when the   
   BBC made a movie about Dr. Watson and Dr. Crick and the double helix, the   
   American actor Jeff Goldblum played him as a tall, stooping and gum-   
   chewing figure. (Dr. Crick and Dr. Franklin were played by the British   
   actors Tim Pigott-Smith and Juliet Stevenson.) The movie, “Life Story”   
   (also known in the United States as “The Race for the Double Helix” or   
   “Double Helix”), first ran on television in 1987.   
      
   Dr. Watson leaves an enormous scientific legacy — his work on the   
   structure of DNA; his inaugural leadership in the sequencing of the human   
   genome, one of the biggest and most significant international scientific   
   efforts ever completed; the researchers he encouraged; and his work at   
   Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, now a major global institution with a   
   string of Nobel laureates among its faculty and associates. His books,   
   especially “The Double Helix,” will no doubt be read as long as people   
   study biology.   
      
   When the sequencing of the genome was announced in 2000, President Clinton   
   referred to the work as revealing God’s “book of life.” But Dr. Watson   
   attributed his success as a researcher in part to his lack of religious   
   belief. He once described himself as an “escapee” from the Roman Catholic   
   faith.   
      
   “The luckiest thing that ever happened to me was that my father didn’t   
   believe in God,” he told Discover magazine in an interview on the 50th   
   anniversary of the publication of the double helix paper.   
      
   That was not to say he did not have faith. In his resignation statement in   
   2007, he referred to the “faith” in reason and social justice that he   
   shared with his Scottish and Irish forebears, especially, he said, “the   
   need for those on top to help care for the less fortunate.”   
      
   Kate Zernike contributed reporting.   
      
   Cornelia Dean is a science writer and the former science editor of The   
   Times. She is the author of “Making Sense of Science.”   
      
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