Among all the items in a new exhibit at the University of Chicago to extol the remarkable life of James D. Watson, the most gratifying to mere mortals may be the transcripts of his undergraduate grades at the school.
“They weren’t very good,” said Watson, 74, screwing his face into a picture of dismay.
Actually, for most undergraduates, his college grades weren’t all that bad: A’s in social science, botany, zoology and physics; A’s and B’s in chemistry; B’s in biology and physical science; C’s in math and English; D’s in German.
Ten years after posting those unremarkable grades, Watson as a callow 25-year-old biologist in 1953 rocked the world with what is now regarded by many to be the most important scientific discovery of the 20th Century — the molecular structure of DNA, the building blocks of life.
Chicago-born Watson’s undergraduate grades are typical of his surprising life.
His biography, when one is finally written, should read like a Dickensian saga, touched with familial love, financial misfortune, a monstrous murder and a bookish kid in a working class South Side neighborhood with unlikely dreams of literary and scientific glory.
Watson, now chancellor of Cold Spring Harbor research laboratories in New York, talked about his Chicago roots when he was in town to help open two exhibits honoring his career and explain his work.
The university’s John Crerar Library opened “Honest Jim: James D. Watson, the Writer,” an exhibit organized by Cold Spring’s library that looks at his literary successes, running through May 28.
The Museum of Science and Industry installed in its permanent genetics exhibit a 7.5-foot model of a DNA molecule’s double helix structure, the discovery for which Watson shared in the 1962 Nobel Prize for medicine with his research colleagues, British genetic pioneers Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins.
He seemed to relish the hometown attention, reflecting on how his roots shaped him, especially his adored father, an intellectually bent man from a well-born family who was forced into a working-class life by the collapse of family fortune.
His father, James Sr., spent much of his life in a job he loathed, bill-collecting for a mail-order correspondence school. A loving husband and father, he and his wife raised Watson, born in 1928, and his younger sister in a tiny bungalow at 7922 S. Luella Ave.
His father, who had to give up college after one year for lack of funds, was an excellent amateur ornithologist. It was a hobby Watson said nearly ruined his father’s life after a chance encounter with a fellow birder in Jackson Park: a teenager named Nathan Leopold Jr.
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Striking up a friendship, his father, Leopold and a third birder put together a study of spring migrating birds in the south Chicago region, getting it published as a small book.
About four years later, in 1924, Leopold and his friend, Richard Loeb, both brilliant, disturbed and the sons of millionaires, captured headlines around the world for their brutal thrill murder of another millionaire’s son, 14-year-old Bobby Franks. They hid the boy’s body in a culvert in one of the elder Watson’s favorite birding haunts, Eggers Woods Forest Preserve.
“Nathan’s father got in touch with my father several months before the murder,” said Watson this week, “and said he was worried about his son’s behavior. He wanted my father to talk to him, but my father hadn’t seen Nathan for months. They never had that talk.”
Reputation on the line
The two young killers readily admitted to the crime once they were caught, and they became so universally reviled that, when Leopold’s family asked Watson’s father to testify as a character witness at the trial, he declined.
“Every one of his friends told him that his reputation in Chicago would be worthless if he did testify,” Watson said.
Watson seemed slightly chagrined by seeing that painful history bubbling to the surface when he was shown a copy of the bird book his father and Leopold co-authored, located in the rare books section of the university library.
“So there is at least one more of those hanging around,” he said. He still has his father’s copy, but he didn’t know of any other surviving copies, he said, until his wife saw one in the New York Public Library a few years ago.
“She stopped in there one day and just looked up my name in the card catalog and found it,” he said. “Before the murder, I think the Leopold family was very proud of that little book and their son’s part in it, and they probably sent out copies to a lot of libraries.
“My father was so upset after the murder that he quit birding. He didn’t take it up again for about 15 years, when I was old enough to go with him. He was willing to do it again when he saw my interest in it, so we started going out to Jackson Park and Eggers Woods.”
Watson himself became so enthusiastic about bird-watching that it inspired him into a life of science. Bright, undersize and lacking athletic skills, he spent more time with books than with boys his own age, and after reading Sinclair Lewis’ novel “Arrowsmith,” he said he fantasized about making his name in science.
“I was brought up in a family that respected books,” he said. “We had hundreds of them in our house. My parents read constantly, and for me it was a way of escaping the limitations of my neighborhood for more interesting places in the world.”
One of the brightest children at Horace Mann Elementary School, and after two years at South Shore High School, Watson was given a remarkable opportunity. In 1942, University of Chicago President Robert Hutchins created a program to bring exceptionally bright high school juniors into the university in an accelerated program that allowed them to graduate from college by the age of 19.
In 1943, at the age of 15, Watson was accepted into the school, where, for the first two years, most of his classes were filled with other youngsters in the same program.
“When I went to the university,” he said, “I lived at home, which was good. I never tried to be an adult socially at that age, but I think that was hard on the 15-year-olds who were there living in the dorms.
“I was no prodigy. There were kids in that program that were a lot brighter than me. A few years ago I was at a reunion function and one of them came up and said, `Boy, nobody thought you were going anywhere, back then.'”
Making the grades
He started out wanting to be a naturalist, but after two years developed an intense interest in the then-emerging field of genetics. With a new goal in life, by the time he was a senior, he was earning straight A’s and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.
“I remember the Chicago [university] experience as being very tough,” he said. “It wasn’t a fun school; you were there to become an intellectual. You were taught about the importance of truth, that crap was best called crap, even if it breached good manners to do so.”
“Chicago had made a pretty serious person out of me. It was more important here to say what you thought than it was to cheerfully get along with everybody.”
At 19, he was in graduate school at Indiana University. By the time he was 23, he had his doctorate and was considered so promising that he was living off fellowships doing postdoctoral research, first in Denmark, then, starting in 1951, at Cambridge University in England.
“I’m not surprised at all by his undergraduate grades,” said Eugene Goldwasser of Watson’s less than stellar Chicago record.
Goldwasser, an emeritus biochemistry and molecular biology professor at the university, and Watson met when they were young scientists both doing research in the same laboratory in Copenhagen.
“Jim was always single-minded,” Wasserman said. “He would immerse himself on subjects that interested him, and to what didn’t interest him he paid no attention, at all.
“I’m sure he was that way as an undergraduate, too. Grades would have meant nothing to him. But, there was no doubt about his intellect. It was obvious then that he was brilliant.”
In an act of courage that many thought was madness, Watson’s single-mindedness pushed him to risk and ultimately lose his fellowship that was funding his postdoctoral research in Denmark.
“Jim wasn’t happy with what he was doing when he was in Copenhagen,” said Goldwasser, “where he had focused on the problem of gene replication. He was convinced even then that the answer was in the structure of the cell, something very few others were thinking at the time.
“One of the few places anybody was looking at the problem the same way was at Cambridge University, so he just up and left Denmark and started working there.”
At Cambridge, he found physicist Francis Crick, who shared Watson’s conviction that discovering the shape of the DNA molecule would solve the mystery of genetic reproduction. The two young scientists also shared an unbridled ambition for scientific immortality and realized that, if they pulled off this discovery, they would win a Nobel Prize.
They also realized they were facing a formidable competitor in the race to solve the DNA puzzle in American chemist Linus Pauling, who seemed on the verge of the discovery at his laboratory at the California Institute of Technology.
All three men suspected the molecule was wound in a spiraling, helical pattern. Pauling announced in January 1953 that it was made up of three strands in a triple helix pattern, a conclusion that was soon disproved, but Watson and Crick were terrified that Pauling was closer to the solution than they were.
At King’s College in London, two scientists, Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin, were each making early, crude X-ray images of DNA molecules. Both dismissed the helical theory, and Franklin, a loner, refused to let Watson and Crick see her images.
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Early in 1953, Watson persuaded Wilkins, who was Franklin’s boss, to let him see Franklin’s images one day when she was away from her lab.
Hint of double helix
One glance was enough for Watson to see a strong hint of a double helix structure in the molecules. Rushing back to Cambridge, within weeks Watson and Crick refined the theory of the double helix and rushed it into print in a now-famous article in the research journal Nature.
Nine years later, the Nobel committee awarded the Nobel to Crick, Watson and Wilkins, but Franklin, who had died three years earlier of cancer, was not named. Nobels are not awarded posthumously.
In 1968, true to the maverick side of his personality, Watson, then teaching at Harvard, wrote an account of his and Crick’s manic quest for fame and glory in “The Double Helix,” a book written not for scientists, but for general readers.
Written in the voice of Watson when he was a gangling, 6 foot 2, 130-pound, 23-year-old postdoc longing for a girlfriend, it reads a bit like an account of Holden Caufield at work in a laboratory. In telling the story of discovery, he freely ridiculed the scientific establishment and many of his colleagues, especially Franklin.
When he finished the book, he showed it to Crick and Wilkins. They were so disturbed, they disclaimed its details and went to Harvard University President Nathan Pusey and persuaded him to stop the university from publishing the book.
Watson took “The Double Helix” to another publisher, and it became an international best seller that still is stocked today on bookstore shelves.
He went on to a long, distinguished career in science, especially at Cold Spring Harbor, where he shepherded research revealing the genetic basis of cancer.
He was also a primary architect and proponent of the now successful $3 billion Human Genome Project launched in 1989 to identify every human gene.
Surprisingly, he claims to be more proud of “The Double Helix” and his other books, especially those written for general audiences, than he is of his stellar record of scientific discovery.
“The DNA structure was going to be found within two or three years, anyway, even if Francis and I hadn’t found it,” Watson said.
“But my book [“The Double Helix”], was my creation, something nobody else could have done. It’s an important story that needs to be told.”