“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 Watson, who co-won the Nobel Prize for discovering DNA's structure, was a towering and controversial figure in science. Watson attended the University of Chicago at age 15, initially intending ...

James Dewey Watson, a molecular biologist whose work helped decode the structure of DNA, died on November 6, 2025, at a hospice in East Northport, N.Y. He was 97 years old. Watson was best known for ...

For James Watson, DNA was everything — not just his life's work, but the secret of life itself. Over his long and storied career, Watson arguably did more than any other scientist to transform a ...