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James Watson, who co-discovered the DNA double helix when he was 24 years old, dies at 97

Published

4 weeks ago

November 9, 2025

James D. Watson, whose co-discovery of the twisted-ladder structure of DNA in 1953 helped light the long fuse on a revolution in medicine, crimefighting, genealogy and ethics, has died. He was 97.

The breakthrough — made when the brash, Chicago-born Watson was just 24 — turned him into a hallowed figure in the world of science for decades. But near the end of his life, he faced condemnation and professional censure for offensive remarks, including saying Black people are less intelligent than white people.

Watson shared a 1962 Nobel Prize with Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins for discovering that deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, is a double helix, consisting of two strands that coil around each other to create what resembles a long, gently twisting ladder.

That realization was a breakthrough. It instantly suggested how hereditary information is stored and how cells duplicate their DNA when they divide. The duplication begins with the two strands of DNA pulling apart like a zipper.

Even among non-scientists, the double helix would become an instantly recognized symbol of science, showing up in such places as the work of Salvador Dali and a British postage stamp.

The discovery helped open the door to more recent developments such as tinkering with the genetic makeup of living things, treating disease by inserting genes into patients, identifying human remains and criminal suspects from DNA samples, and tracing family trees and ancient human ancestors. But it has also raised a host of ethical questions, such as whether we should be altering the body’s blueprint for cosmetic reasons or in a way that is transmitted to a person’s offspring.

“Francis Crick and I made the discovery of the century, that was pretty clear,” Watson once said. He later wrote: “There was no way we could have foreseen the explosive impact of the double helix on science and society.”

Watson never made another lab finding that big. But in the decades that followed, he wrote influential textbooks and a best-selling memoir and helped guide the project to map the human genome. He picked out bright young scientists and helped them. And he used his prestige and contacts to influence science policy.

Watson died in hospice care after a brief illness, his son said Friday. His former research lab confirmed he passed away a day earlier.

“He never stopped fighting for people who were suffering from disease,” Duncan Watson said of his father.

Watson’s initial motivation for supporting the gene project was personal: His son Rufus had been hospitalized with a possible diagnosis of schizophrenia, and Watson figured that knowing the complete makeup of DNA would be crucial for understanding that disease — maybe in time to help his son.

He gained unwelcome attention in 2007, when the Sunday Times Magazine of London quoted him as saying he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours — where all the testing says not really.” He said that while he hopes everyone is equal, “people who have to deal with Black employees find this is not true.”

He apologized, but after an international furor he was suspended from his job as chancellor of the prestigious Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York. He retired a week later. He had served in various leadership jobs there for nearly 40 years.

In a television documentary that aired in early 2019, Watson was asked if his views had changed. “No, not at all,” he said. In response, the Cold Spring Harbor lab revoked several honorary titles it had given Watson, saying his statements were “reprehensible” and “unsupported by science.”

Watson’s combination of scientific achievement and controversial remarks created a complicated legacy.

He has shown “a regrettable tendency toward inflammatory and offensive remarks, especially late in his career,” Dr. Francis Collins, then-director of the National Institutes of Health, said in 2019. “His outbursts, particularly when they reflected on race, were both profoundly misguided and deeply hurtful. I only wish that Jim’s views on society and humanity could have matched his brilliant scientific insights.”

Long before that, Watson scorned political correctness.

“A goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid,” he wrote in “The Double Helix,” his bestselling 1968 book about the DNA discovery.

For success in science, he wrote: “You have to avoid dumb people. … Never do anything that bores you. … If you can’t stand to be with your real peers (including scientific competitors) get out of science. … To make a huge success, a scientist has to be prepared to get into deep trouble.”

It was in the fall of 1951 that the tall, skinny Watson — already the holder of a Ph.D. at 23 — arrived at Britain’s Cambridge University, where he met Crick. As a Watson biographer later said, “It was intellectual love at first sight.”

Crick himself wrote that the partnership thrived in part because the two men shared “a certain youthful arrogance, a ruthlessness, and an impatience with sloppy thinking.”

Together they sought to tackle the structure of DNA, aided by X-ray research by colleague Rosalind Franklin and her graduate student Raymond Gosling. Watson was later criticized for a disparaging portrayal of Franklin in “The Double Helix,” and today she is considered a prominent example of a female scientist whose contributions were overlooked. (She died in 1958.)

Watson and Crick built Tinker Toy-like models to work out the molecule’s structure. One Saturday morning in 1953, after fiddling with bits of cardboard he had carefully cut to represent fragments of the DNA molecule, Watson suddenly realized how these pieces could form the “rungs” of a double helix ladder.

His first reaction: “It’s so beautiful.”

Figuring out the double helix “goes down as one of the three most important discoveries in the history of biology,” alongside Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection and Gregor Mendel’s fundamental laws of genetics, said Cold Spring Harbor lab’s president, Bruce Stillman.

Following the discovery, Watson spent two years at the California Institute of Technology, then joined the faculty at Harvard in 1955. Before leaving Harvard in 1976, he essentially created the university’s program for molecular biology, scientist Mark Ptashne recalled in a 1999 interview.

Watson became director of the Cold Spring Harbor lab in 1968, its president in 1994 and its chancellor 10 years later. He made the lab on Long Island an educational center for scientists and non-scientists, focused research on cancer, instilled a sense of excitement and raised huge amounts of money.

He transformed the lab into a “vibrant, incredibly important center,” Ptashne said. It was “one of the miracles of Jim: a more disheveled, less smooth, less typically ingratiating person you could hardly imagine.”

From 1988 to 1992, Watson directed the federal effort to identify the detailed makeup of human DNA. He created the project’s huge investment in ethics research by simply announcing it at a news conference. He later said it was “probably the wisest thing I’ve done over the past decade.”

Watson was on hand at the White House in 2000 for the announcement that the federal project had completed an important goal: a “working draft” of the human genome, basically a road map to an estimated 90 percent of human genes.

Researchers presented Watson with the detailed description of his own genome in 2007. It was one of the first genomes of an individual to be deciphered.

Watson knew that genetic research could produce findings that make some people uncomfortable. In 2007, he wrote that when scientists identify genetic variants that predispose people to crime or significantly affect intelligence, the findings should be publicized rather than squelched out of political correctness.

James Dewey Watson was born in Chicago on April 6, 1928, into “a family that believed in books, birds and the Democratic Party,” as he put it. From his birdwatcher father he inherited an interest in ornithology and a distaste for explanations that didn’t rely on reason or science.

Watson was a precocious child who loved to read, studying books like “The World Telegraph Almanac of Facts.” He entered the University of Chicago on a scholarship at 15, graduated at 19 and earned his doctorate in zoology at Indiana University three years later.

He got interested in genetics at age 17 when he read a book that said genes were the essence of life.

“I thought, ‘Well, if the gene is the essence of life, I want to know more about it,’” he later recalled. “And that was fateful because, otherwise, I would have spent my life studying birds and no one would have heard of me.”

At the time, it wasn’t clear that genes were made of DNA, at least for any life form other than bacteria. But Watson went to Europe to study the biochemistry of nucleic acids like DNA. At a conference in Italy, Watson saw an X-ray image that indicated DNA could form crystals.

“Suddenly I was excited about chemistry,” Watson wrote in “The Double Helix.” If genes could crystallize, “they must have a regular structure that could be solved in a straightforward fashion.”

“A potential key to the secret of life was impossible to push out of my mind,” he recalled.

In the decades after his discovery, Watson’s fame persisted. Apple Computer used his picture in an ad campaign. At conferences, graduate students who weren’t even born when he worked at Cambridge nudged each other and whispered, “There’s Watson. There’s Watson.” They got him to autograph napkins or copies of “The Double Helix.”

A reporter asked him 2018 if any building at the Cold Spring Harbor lab was named after him. No, Watson replied, “I don’t need a building named after me. I have the double helix.”

His 2007 remarks on race were not the first time Watson struck a nerve with his comments. In a speech in 2000, he suggested that sex drive is related to skin color. And earlier he told a newspaper that if a gene governing sexuality were found and could be detected in the womb, a woman who didn’t want to have a gay child should be allowed to have an abortion.

More than a half-century after winning the Nobel, Watson put the gold medal up for auction in 2014. The winning bid, $4.7 million, set a record for a Nobel. The medal was eventually returned to Watson.

Both of Watson’s Nobel co-winners, Crick and Wilkins, died in 2004.

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Ritter is a retired AP science writer. AP science writers Christina Larson in Washington and Adithi Ramakrishnan in New York contributed to this report.

___

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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Apple rocked by executive departures, with chip chief at risk of leaving next

Published

15 minutes ago

December 6, 2025

Jace Porter

Apple Inc., long the model of stability in Silicon Valley, is suddenly undergoing its biggest personnel shake-up in decades, with senior executives and key engineers both hitting the exits.

In just the past week, Apple’s heads of artificial intelligence and interface design stepped down. Then the company announced that its general counsel and head of governmental affairs were leaving as well. All four executives have reported directly to Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook, marking an exceptional level of turnover in Apple’s C-suite.

And more changes are likely coming. Johny Srouji — senior vice president of hardware technologies and one of Apple’s most respected executives — recently told Cook that he is seriously considering leaving in the near future, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Srouji, the architect of Apple’s prized in-house chips effort, has informed colleagues that he intends to join another company if he ultimately departs.

At the same time, AI talent has been fleeing for tech rivals — with Meta Platforms Inc., OpenAI and a variety of startups poaching many of Apple’s engineers. That threatens to hamper the company’s efforts to catch up in artificial intelligence, an area where it’s struggled to make a mark.

It all adds up to one of the most tumultuous stretches of Cook’s tenure. Though the CEO himself is unlikely to leave imminently, the company has to rebuild its ranks and figure out how to thrive in the AI era.

Within the company, some of the departures are cause for deep concern — with Cook looking to stave off more with stronger compensation packages for key talent. In other cases, the exits just reflect the fact that veteran executives are nearing retirement age. Still, many of the shifts constitute a disconcerting brain drain.

While Cook maintains that Apple is working on the most innovative product lineup in its history — a slate that’s expected to include foldable iPhones and iPads, smart glasses, and robots — Apple hasn’t launched a successful new product category in a decade. That leaves it vulnerable to poaching from a range of nimbler rivals better equipped to develop the next generation of devices around AI.

A spokesperson for Cupertino, California-based Apple declined to comment.

The exit of Apple’s AI chief, John Giannandrea, followed a number of stumbles in generative AI. The company’s Apple Intelligence platform has suffered from delays and subpar features. And a highly touted overhaul to the Siri voice assistant is roughly a year and a half behind schedule. Moreover, the software will rely heavily on a partnership with Alphabet Inc.’s Google to fill the gaps in its capabilities.

Against that backdrop, Apple began phasing Giannandrea out of his role in March but is allowing him to remain until next spring.

Within Apple, employees have long expected Giannandrea to step aside — and some have expressed surprise that he’s sticking around as long as he is.

But parting ways with Giannandrea sooner would have been taken as public acknowledgment of a problem, people familiar with the situation said.

Design veteran Alan Dye, meanwhile, is heading to Meta’s Reality Labs unit — a remarkable defection to one of Apple’s fiercest rivals.

Within a day of that news, Apple turned around and announced that it had poached one of Meta’s executives. Jennifer Newstead, chief legal officer at the social networking company, will become Apple’s general counsel. She helped oversee Meta’s successful antitrust battle with the US Federal Trade Commission — experience that’s likely to prove useful in Apple’s own legal fight with the Justice Department over alleged anticompetitive practices.

Newstead is taking over for Kate Adams, who served eight years in the role and will retire in late 2026. Lisa Jackson, vice president for environment, policy and social initiatives, is retiring as well — and her duties will be divided up among other executives.

Though the news of Adams’ departure was jarring — especially considering the number of Apple legal disputes currently on her plate — she’s had a fairly long tenure for a general counsel at the company.

Jackson, meanwhile, was widely expected to be leaving soon. The former Obama administration official has kept a lower profile during President Donald Trump’s second term, opting to dispatch deputies to handle discussions with the White House. Bloomberg News had previously reportedthat she was considering retirement.

These exits follow an even bigger departure. Jeff Williams, Cook’s longtime No. 2, retired last month after a decade as chief operating officer. Another veteran leader, Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri, stepped into a smaller role at the start of 2025 and is likely to retire in the not-too-distant future.

The flurry of retirements reflects a demographic reality for Apple. Many of its most senior executives have been at the company for decades and are roughly the same age — either in their 60s or nearing it.

Cook turned 65 last month, fueling speculation that he would join the exodus. People close to the executive have said that he’s unlikely to leave soon, though succession planning has been underway for years. John Ternus, Apple’s 50-year-old hardware engineering chief, is considered by employees to be the frontrunner CEO candidate.

When Cook does step down, he’s likely to shift into the chairman job and maintain a high level of influence over the iPhone maker. That makes it unlikely that Apple will select an outsider as the next CEO, even as executives like Nest Labs founder Tony Fadell are being pushed as candidates by people outside the company. Though Fadell helped invent Apple’s iconic iPod, he left the tech giant 15 years ago on less-than-friendly terms.

For now, Cook remains active at Apple and travels extensively on behalf of the company. However, the executive does have an unexplained tremor that causes his hands to shake from time to time — something that’s been discussed among Apple employees in recent months.

The shaking has been noticed by both executives and rank-and-file staff during meetings and large company gatherings, according to people familiar with the matter. But people close to Cook say he is healthy and refute rumors to the contrary that have circulated in Silicon Valley.

A more imminent risk is the departure of Srouji, the chip chief. Cook has been working aggressively to retain him — an effort that included offering a substantial pay package and the potential of more responsibility down the road. One scenario floated internally by some executives involves elevating him into the role of chief technology officer. Such a job — overseeing a wide swath of both hardware engineering and silicon technologies — would potentially make him Apple’s second-most-powerful executive.

But that change would likely require Ternus to be promoted to CEO, a step the company may not be ready to take. And some within Apple have said that Srouji would prefer not to work under a different CEO, even with an expanded title.

If Srouji does depart, which isn’t yet a certainty, the company would likely tap one of his two top lieutenants — Zongjian Chen or Sribalan Santhanam — to replace him.

The recent shifts are already reshaping Apple’s power structure. More authority is now flowing to a quartet of executives: Ternus, services chief Eddy Cue, software head Craig Federighi and new COO Sabih Khan. Apple’s AI efforts have been redistributed across its leadership, with Federighi becoming the company’s de facto AI chief.

Ternus is also poised to take a starring role next year in the celebration of Apple’s 50th anniversary, further raising his profile. And he’s been given more responsibility over robotics and smart glasses — two areas seen as future growth drivers.

Further reorganization is likely. Deirdre O’Brien, head of retail and human resources, has been with Apple for more than 35 years, while marketing chief Greg Joswiak has spent four decades at the company. Apple has elevated the key lieutenants under both executives, preparing for their eventual retirements.

At the same time, Apple is contending with a talent drain in its engineering ranks. This has become a serious concern for the executive team, and Apple’s human resources organization has been instructed to ramp up recruitment and retention efforts, people familiar with the situation said.

Robby Walker, who had overseen Siri and an initiative to build a ChatGPT-like search experience, left the company in October. His replacement, Ke Yang, departed after only weeks in the job, joining Meta’s new Superintelligence Labs.

To help fill the void left by Giannandrea, Apple hired Google and Microsoft Corp. alum Amar Subramanya as vice president of artificial intelligence. He’ll report to Federighi, the software chief.

But there’s been a broader collapse within Apple’s artificial intelligence organization, spurred by the departure of AI models chief Ruoming Pang. Pang, along with colleagues such as Tom Gunter and Frank Chu, went to Meta, which has used eye-popping compensation packages to lure talent.

Roughly a dozen other top AI researchers have left the organization, which is suffering from low morale. The company’s increasing use of external AI technology, such as Google’s Gemini, has been a particular concern for employees working on large language models.

Apple’s AI robotics software team has also seen widespread departures, including its leader Jian Zhang, who likewise joined Meta. That group is tasked with creating underlying technology for products such as a tabletop robot and a mobile bot.

The hardware team for the tabletop device, code-named J595, has been bleeding talent too — with some headed to OpenAI. Dye also was a key figure overseeing that product’s software design.

The user interface organization has been hit as well, with several team members leaving between 2023 and this year. That attrition culminated in Dye’s exit, which stemmed partly from a desire to integrate AI more deeply into products and a feeling that Apple hasn’t been keeping pace in the area. Another top interface leader under Dye, Billy Sorrentino, also left for Meta.

The hardware side of the design group — the team responsible for the physical look and feel of Apple’s products — has been nearly wiped out over the last half-decade. Many staffers followed former design chief Jony Ive to his studio, LoveFrom, or went to other companies.

Longtime interface designer Stephen Lemay is now stepping in as Dye’s replacement. Cook is also taking on more responsibility for overseeing design, a role that had been held by Williams.

Ive, a visionary designer who helped create the iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch, is now working with OpenAI to develop a new generation of AI-enhanced devices. That company acquired Ive’s startup, io, for more than $6 billion to jump-start its hardware business — setting its sights on Apple’s territory.

Like Meta, OpenAI has become a key beneficiary of Apple’s talent flight. The San Francisco-based company has hired dozens of Apple engineers across a wide range of fields, including people working on the iPhone, Mac, camera technology, silicon design, audio, watches and the Vision Pro headset.

In a previously unreported development, the AI company is hiring Apple’s Cheng Chen, a senior director in charge of display technologies. His purview included the optics that go into the Vision Pro headset. OpenAI recruited Tang Tan, one of Apple’s top hardware engineering executives, two years ago.

And over the summer, the company lost the dean of Apple University, the internal program designed to preserve the company’s culture and practices after the passing of co-founder Steve Jobs. Richard Locke, who spent nearly three years at Apple, left to become dean of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s business school.

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Business

Epstein grand jury documents from Florida can be released by DOJ, judge rules

Published

47 minutes ago

December 6, 2025

Jace Porter

A federal judge on Friday gave the Justice Department permission to release transcripts of a grand jury investigation into Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse of underage girls in Florida — a case that ultimately ended without any federal charges being filed against the millionaire sex offender.

U.S. District Judge Rodney Smith said a recently passed federal law ordering the release of records related to Epstein overrode the usual rules about grand jury secrecy.

The law signed in November by President Donald Trump compels the Justice Department, FBI and federal prosecutors to release later this month the vast troves of material they have amassed during investigations into Epstein that date back at least two decades.

Friday’s court ruling dealt with the earliest known federal inquiry.

In 2005, police in Palm Beach, Florida, where Epstein had a mansion, began interviewing teenage girls who told of being hired to give the financier sexualized massages. The FBI later joined the investigation.

Federal prosecutors in Florida prepared an indictment in 2007, but Epstein’s lawyers attacked the credibility of his accusers publicly while secretly negotiating a plea bargain that would let him avoid serious jail time.

In 2008, Epstein pleaded guilty to relatively minor state charges of soliciting prostitution from someone under age 18. He served most of his 18-month sentence in a work release program that let him spend his days in his office.

The U.S. attorney in Miami at the time, Alex Acosta, agreed not to prosecute Epstein on federal charges — a decision that outraged Epstein’s accusers. After the Miami Herald reexamined the unusual plea bargain in a series of stories in 2018, public outrage over Epstein’s light sentence led to Acosta’s resignation as Trump’s labor secretary.

A Justice Department report in 2020 found that Acosta exercised “poor judgment” in handling the investigation, but it also said he did not engage in professional misconduct.

A different federal prosecutor, in New York, brought a sex trafficking indictment against Epstein in 2019, mirroring some of the same allegations involving underage girls that had been the subject of the aborted investigation. Epstein killed himself while awaiting trial. His longtime confidant and ex-girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell, was then tried on similar charges, convicted and sentenced in 2022 to 20 years in prison.

Transcripts of the grand jury proceedings from the aborted federal case in Florida could shed more light on federal prosecutors’ decision not to go forward with it. Records related to state grand jury proceedings have already been made public.

When the documents will be released is unknown. The Justice Department asked the court to unseal them so they could be released with other records required to be disclosed under the Epstein Files Transparency Act. The Justice Department hasn’t set a timetable for when it plans to start releasing information, but the law set a deadline of Dec. 19.

The law also allows the Justice Department to withhold files that it says could jeopardize an active federal investigation. Files can also be withheld if they’re found to be classified or if they pertain to national defense or foreign policy.

One of the federal prosecutors on the Florida case did not answer a phone call Friday and the other declined to answer questions.

A judge had previously declined to release the grand jury records, citing the usual rules about grand jury secrecy, but Smith said the new federal law allowed public disclosure.

The Justice Department has separate requests pending for the release of grand jury records related to the sex trafficking cases against Epstein and Maxwell in New York. The judges in those matters have said they plan to rule expeditiously.

___

Sisak reported from New York.

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Business

Miss Universe co-owner gets bank accounts frozen as part of probe into drugs, fuel and arms trafficking

Published

1 hour ago

December 6, 2025

Jace Porter

Mexico’s anti-money laundering office has frozen the bank accounts of the Mexican co-owner of Miss Universe as part of an investigation into drugs, fuel and arms trafficking, an official said Friday.

The country’s Financial Intelligence Unit, which oversees the fight against money laundering, froze Mexican businessman Raúl Rocha Cantú’s bank accounts in Mexico, a federal official told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment on the investigation.

The action against Rocha Cantú adds to mounting controversies for the Miss Universe organization. Last week, a court in Thailand issued an arrest warrant for the Thai co-owner of the Miss Universe Organization in connection with a fraud case and this year’s competition — won by Miss Mexico Fatima Bosch — faced allegations of rigging.

The Miss Universe organization did not immediately respond to an email from The Associated Press seeking comment about the allegations against Rocha Cantú.

Mexico’s federal prosecutors said last week that Rocha Cantú has been under investigation since November 2024 for alleged organized crime activity, including drug and arms trafficking, as well as fuel theft. Last month, a federal judge issued 13 arrest warrants for some of those involved in the case, including the Mexican businessman, whose company Legacy Holding Group USA owns 50% of the Miss Universe shares.

The organization’s other 50% belongs to JKN Global Group Public Co. Ltd., a company owned by Jakkaphong “Anne” Jakrajutatip.

A Thai court last week issued an arrest warrant for Jakrajutatip who was released on bail in 2023 on the fraud case. She failed to appear as required in a Bangkok court on Nov. 25. Since she did not notify the court about her absence, she was deemed to be a flight risk, according to a statement from the Bangkok South District Court.

The court rescheduled her hearing for Dec. 26.

Rocha Cantú was also a part owner of the Casino Royale in the northern Mexican city of Monterrey, when it was attacked in 2011 by a group of gunmen who entered it, doused gasoline and set it on fire, killing 52 people.

Baltazar Saucedo Estrada, who was charged with planning the attack, was sentenced in July to 135 years in prison.

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