Double helix, singular man

An impish grin spread across the Nobel laureate’s face as he rocketed a forehand just out of reach of the young tennis pro.

“Nice one, Doc,” said the pro as he reached for another ball.

James Watson stood at the baseline expectantly. His paunch protruded slightly, the product of advancing years and spending the past few months on the rubber chicken circuit celebrating the 50th anniversary of a discovery that revolutionized the world.

Watson returned hundreds of balls over the next hour at the exclusive indoor courts of the Piping Rock Club, where tennis whites are mandatory. Sweat stained his shirt and beaded on his forehead. When the workout was finished, Watson mentioned that a British newspaper had once described him as elderly. It was as if this session was to show that he did not, at 74, have one foot in the grave.

Fifty years ago, Watson, then a brash young man of 25, and fellow scientist Francis Crick announced their discovery of the molecular structure of DNA -- hailed as one of the greatest scientific achievements of the 20th century. Without it, the world of science would be a much drearier place, with diminished chances of finding the cures for diseases that now seem within reach. So much less would be known about how the body works in sickness and health. Not only that, but cops would not be nailing as many bad guys. And those wrongly convicted would still be languishing in prison with no hope of exoneration. In layman’s terms, DNA opened the window on how biology worked, what made each living organism different from all the others.

But so great an achievement at so young an age has brought with it a peculiar burden that Watson has borne at times with grace and dignity, but also with a fair share of oddity and pettiness.

Among scientists, he is a venerated (and sometimes prickly) elder statesman -- even more so in the past few months with all the ballyhoo over the 50th anniversary. There was the conference in Monterey earlier this year sponsored by Time magazine (immodestly titled the “Future of Life” summit) at which Watson was the star attraction. He rated a center-stage session in which he was interviewed for an hour about his life and accomplishments, which include writing the bestselling “The Double Helix,” the book that vaulted him into the consciousness of the general public. Then it was off to New York for a gala at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel, which featured, among other things, the appearance of a man freed from prison because of DNA evidence.

But he has also been dogged through these many decades with his pointed, off-the-cuff ways, which have at times made him his own worst enemy. James Watson has not gone gently into the night.

Watson quickly showered after his tennis match and headed back to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, the scientific mecca that he has overseen for more than a third of a century, first as director and now as president. It is also the place he gave his first public presentation of what he and Crick had discovered at Cambridge University in 1953.

He drove his Volvo station wagon like a man in a hurry, negotiating the narrow, winding lanes of Long Island’s gold coast -- the north shore, Gatsby country.

And then he pulled into the lab’s entrance at Bungtown Road, where a cluster of buildings and dorms and homes line the quaint old whaling harbor. It is a place where scientists convene for meetings on the average of once a week -- a coveted destination point, particularly for those associated with genetics.

Watson took over the laboratory in 1968 when it was moving toward disrepair and returned it to the status of a world-class research institution. Almost immediately, he made cancer research the main focus of the lab, targeting a disease that would make fund-raising easier.

His unofficial biographer, Victor McElheny, said he believed Watson realized the best part of his own scientific work was behind him, with the discovery of DNA as the crowning achievement. “He knew he would never do anything on that scale ever again,” he said. “It was time to get other people’s science going.” Which is what he has done for the last 35 years -- promoting science and giving it a place to incubate.

Watson now believes that a cure for cancer is within reach and envisions an approaching time when people simply take pills to arrest the disease. In fact, he favors a 60th anniversary retrospective on DNA because he anticipates the advances in the next 10 years will be so great.

“The science is moving at such a rate that it’s an exciting time,” he said. “Hopefully, we will be able to begin a map of human variations -- the things that make a difference. We’ll know why some people are tall and some people are short. We’ll know why your nose looks like yours and mine looks like mine.”

Watson often speaks in odd sentences. Even the people who have known him for years talk of his way of starting one sentence, breaking it off to start another and, perhaps, another, before returning to his original thought.

“You know just to sit there and wait,” said Jan Witkowski, who’s been one of Watson’s closest associates for more than 15 years.

Watson also is known for his outbursts and temper tantrums when he feels the need arises. For instance, at the Monterey conference, he was in the audience when ethicist Daniel Callahan argued that bioscientists don’t absolutely have to have embryonic stem cells in their quest to cure diseases.

“That’s crap,” roared Watson from his seat, briefly reducing the meeting to absolute silence.

And then there are times when Watson says the most outlandish things, what McElheny described as “calculated bizarreness” designed to keep genetic research at the forefront. Take, for instance, the controversy that began when Watson suggested at a Berkeley lecture three years ago that there are biochemical links between skin color and sexual activity and between thinness and ambition.

“That’s why you have Latin lovers,” he told the flabbergasted audience. “You’ve never heard of an English lover. Only an English patient.”

As for overweight people, he said: “Whenever you interview fat people, you feel bad, because you know you’re not going to hire them.”

Or, for that matter, his description of Rosalind Franklin, a noted scientist who was in the thick of the DNA race when Watson and Crick made their breakthrough discovery. Watson has often been criticized for his unflattering portrayal of Franklin in “The Double Helix,” even though she was, first of all, long dead and, second, the person who provided a key clue allowing him and Crick to crack DNA’s structure.

At the Monterey symposium, Franklin came up again, this time in the form of a sit-down with Watson before about 200 participants. Watson, whose new book “DNA: The Secret of Life” will be published this month, was being interviewed by ABC News correspondent Robert Krulwich. The newsman quoted Watson’s long-ago description of Franklin: “By choice, she did not emphasize her feminine qualities. She was not unattractive and might have been quite stunning had she taken a mild interest in clothes, which she did not.”

A more prudent man, in retrospect, might have agreed it was an unfair and ill-advised characterization, but not Watson.

“She did not go out of her way to make herself attractive,” Watson insisted.

“You’re doing it again,” said Krulwich.

“No, but it’s true,” Watson replied stubbornly.

The story of Watson and Crick’s discovery can now be recited by most any high school biology student, including the question of whether they were completely above board as they worked to unravel the mystery of the double helix. In essence, the structure of the double helix, which looks much like a spiral staircase, gives DNA the blueprint of living organisms, which laid the groundwork for understanding evolution, disease, inheritance and more.

Watson had grown up on Chicago’s South Side, the son of a bill collector and a secretary, who preferred Sunday bird-watching outings to attending church with his mother. He started college at 15 and had his bachelor’s degree by 19. Three years later, the skinny, fuzzy-haired zoologist had earned his PhD from Indiana University.

And only three years after that, he and Crick would make their breakthrough discovery at Cambridge, leading to the famously understated Nature article on April 25, 1953, that began: “We wish to suggest a structure for the salt of deoxyribose nucleic acid (D.N.A.). This structure has novel features, which are of considerable biological interest.”

So what happened after the DNA discovery? Were he and Crick feted throughout the world? In a word, no. Virtually nothing happened in the immediate aftermath because the importance of the discovery was only understood by a small circle of scientists, perhaps no more than 50. It would be 10 more years before the Nobel Prize would come Watson and Crick’s way, giving them the acclaim for their work. And it would be six years after that before Watson wrote “The Double Helix.”

Since their historic discovery, Watson and Crick have taken divergent paths, not only in their work but their public personae. Crick continues to do weighty research, the most recent being the quest to learn how consciousness works. For the last 10 years he has worked at the Salk Institution in La Jolla. He keeps a very low public profile, especially compared to Watson, who not only likes the limelight but is constantly faced with the need to raise money for the laboratory.

Lobbying for government and foundation grants is a key part of his work, so he’s developed a flair for showmanship. That, coupled with his penchant for seemingly outlandish statements, has made him the more recognizable and written about of the two famous scientists.

His personal burden has also been greater because one of his two sons has a brain disorder that has prevented him from leaving home and living on his own.

The path that he took after Cambridge led him to Caltech as a senior research fellow. But despite the vaunted status of the school, Watson was not a happy young man in his California surroundings.

“It was small and there were no girls,” he recalled of Caltech, “and the work wasn’t going good.”

The work, indeed, was not going well, especially when compared to the heady Cambridge years. Only a year later, Watson moved east, where he became an assistant professor of biology at Harvard. He was hired even though he mumbled his way through a guest lectureship. It was a relationship that would last for the next 20 years.

One constant for Watson throughout those early years was his search for a relationship with a woman. But it wasn’t easy for him, even as he moved from his 20s into his 30s. There was one woman, seven years his junior, named Christa Mayr, whom he met in the United States, then courted in Britain and Europe. But she jilted him on a visit to the English Lake District over the Christmas holidays of 1955.

“The time to say goodbye was at hand,” he wrote in his 2002 book, “Genes, Girls and Gamow,” which was intended to be a sequel to the “The Double Helix.” “Even a slight hug, now, would be wrong, and my last memory of Christa was her sleepless face disappearing into the train compartment. Walking back along the platform, I felt like vomiting.”

As the years went on at Harvard, Watson took to hiring attractive young lab assistants from nearby Radcliffe College, employing the logic that “if you have pretty girls in the lab, you don’t have to go out.”

McElheny, who wrote “Watson and DNA,” said the young Nobel laureate also took to attending Radcliffe parties, known as jolly-ups, in hopes of finding companionship.

“Here comes this 35-year-old and he wants to come to jolly-ups,” said McElheny. “Not only that, he wants to have them at his apartment as well. He was constantly swinging and missing.”

That ended when he met Elizabeth Vickery Lewis of Providence, R.I., a 19-year-old Radcliffe sophomore who was working in the Harvard lab. In short order, they planned a wedding, which took place in La Jolla immediately after Watson delivered a lecture to a meeting of the American Cancer Society. Watson had achieved, by a matter of just a few days, his goal of marrying before the age of 40.

In that same year, 1968, “The Double Helix” was published amid a firestorm of criticism (particularly by scientists, including Crick), as being too glib and self-centered. And Watson agreed to take over the Cold Spring Harbor lab on a part-time, unpaid basis.

In a way, 1968 marked the beginning of a second life for Watson. Having helped Harvard become one of the mainstays of molecular biology, he turned his attention to the rejuvenation of Cold Spring Harbor, which Witkowski described as “moribund as opposed to a dying institution.” But the fact was that, for lack of funding, the compound was dilapidated and in need of a major rejuvenation.

In 1976, Watson left Harvard to become the full-time director of the Cold Spring lab. Buildings were repaired. New ones were built. The lab flourished as a center for science. The campus expanded. In 1988, Watson became the first director of the Human Genome Project, the highly controversial $3-billion project that had the enormous task of sequencing and mapping the genes that make up the human genome, along with the legal and ethical issues that come with it. He resigned four years later, saying he was being forced out of the office.

Through it all, Watson has never shrunk from controversy in this, perhaps the most controversial of all scientific fields. He is someone who is talked about, even if it is to discuss his penchant for off-the-wall remarks.

“Whenever two people get together who know him,” said Witkowski, “the conversation eventually turns to Jim.”

As he nibbled at his fruit-plate lunch in the conference room next to his office, Watson pondered the question of what he would change or do differently if he could relive his distinguished life. For one, he said, he’d have started playing with tennis pros much earlier in life (“One hour with them is worth three with anyone else”).

But then he got serious, talking about his sons. One of them, Duncan, lives in San Francisco and is thriving. The other, Rufus, suffers from epilepsy of the thalamus and cannot live alone. So at 33, he remains with his parents at Cold Spring Harbor. They have tried a number of treatments and therapies, but none has worked.

Watson and his wife cannot travel together often because of the need for one to be close to home. And it means frustration for the son, now a mature man for whom daily life is a task. Watson does not dwell on the subject but simply underlines it, a father who has achieved greatness -- before most people have even set a career course -- but still bears a burden that must be dealt with each day.

“He’s frustrated and I’m frustrated,” said Watson, his voice low and even. “It’s our own private hell.”