James D. Watson has died at age 97. He, Francis Crick, Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin participated in the 1953 discovery that DNA has a double helical structure. In 1962, the first three shared Nobel Prize for that. Rosalind Franklin had died in 1958 and was thus not eligible. It is notable that Watson and Crick were 23 and 25 years old in 1953. James D. Watson also generated a lot of controversy concerning claimed racial differences in intelligence and sexual drives. Within biology, discovery of helical structure of DNA is regarded at the most important of 20th century.
Is there much likelihood that she would have shared the Nobel if still alive? It seems that many like her have been passed over.
It remains a matter of speculation. My understanding is that her X-ray crystallography of organic molecules was unparalleled at the time. Speculation (mine and others) is that winning team would not have succeeded with her work. There was competition from others including Linus Pauling who was barking up the wrong tree. Triple helix IIRC. A knowing look at the XRC would have cured him of that. -- Anyway this ought be more a celebration of Watson. He later separately developed Cold Spring Harbor Lab into the powerhouse it remains. Without his strong backing the Human Genomic Project would have proceeded much more slowly. Nucleotide sequencing was in infancy back then. Watson also had grumpy days and I may have said enough about that.
Don't forget that there is a 12 hour window to edit posts, fixing typos and hiding the evidence. Usually. I ran into one last rnight where the edit window kept freezing until the clock ran out this morning, but that seems rare.
