Today is the second class of our current November class period. The start time for our class will be 10:00am. We will begin class with a casual conversation. Our reading today is about longevity. Please try to read as much as possible. Underline any words or sentences that are unfamiliar. Our listening is about James Watson. Please listen and follow the transcript. We will complete our grammar sentences.
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SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
For James Watson, DNA was everything - not just his life's work, but the secret of life itself. As a young man, he codiscovered the structure of DNA and helped set off a revolution in science. Watson died today at the age of 97, and as NPR's Nell Greenfieldboyce reports, he was a scientific superstar until he made racist remarks that made him an outcast.
NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE, BYLINE: If you think of DNA, you can probably imagine its double helix - that spiral-staircase-like structure. These days, it's common knowledge that DNA is like a code. People casually talk about DNA testing. But DNA wasn't always famous. Biologists discovered it way back in the 1860s. For almost a century, no one understood its significance. Then, in the 1950s, a young American researcher named James Watson went to England, supposedly to study proteins.
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JAMES WATSON: There I met Francis Crick. I went there without knowing him. He was 35. I was 23.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: That's Watson speaking in a TED Talk. He said Crick shared his fascination with DNA, which they believed might be related to heredity, a part of biology that was still very mysterious. Within a day of meeting each other, they decided maybe they could figure out its structure using a shortcut.
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WATSON: Not solve it in rigorous fashion, but build a model.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: A literal model out of cardboard or metal - basically, they fiddled around, trying to devise a molecular structure that could account for all of the observations about DNA made by other scientists - scientists like Rosalind Franklin. She was also in England, painstakingly using X-rays to probe DNA. Watson and Crick had buddies that told them about her unpublished work. They relied on it to assemble the first accurate model of its structure.
Elspeth Garman is a structural biologist at the University of Oxford. She's written about Franklin's life and what came to be called the Watson-Crick model of DNA.
ELSPETH GARMAN: I think she didn't bear him any grudges because I don't think she knew the extent of what he'd seen and when.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: She notes that Franklin died of cancer in her 30s. A few years later, Watson and Crick shared the Nobel Prize, which is only given to living scientists. Then, Watson published a book called "The Double Helix." It was a gossipy, pulp fiction account of the discovery, and it portrayed Franklin as an inexplicably hostile shrew who refused to wear lipstick or share data. Garman says the book's sexist, unfair treatment of Franklin is unforgivable.
GARMAN: And it was so unnecessary. I mean, he had a Nobel Prize. Why did he need to do that to her?
GREENFIELDBOYCE: The book was a bestseller. It helped make Watson a popular celebrity. In science, he already was a force to be reckoned with. He wrote a classic textbook on molecular biology, then he spent decades leading Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, turning it into a genetics powerhouse. In the 1980s, when the federal government made the controversial decision to fund an ambitious effort to sequence all human genes, Watson got tapped to be the first director of the Human Genome Project.
Nathaniel Comfort is a professor in the history of medicine at the Johns Hopkins University. He says Watson slapped the double helix on everything and helped turn it into an icon. He spent his life spreading the gospel of DNA.
NATHANIEL COMFORT: He believed this was the new science. We needed to get rid of the old science. He created tremendous enthusiasm for this new molecular genetics.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: And this had a transformational effect on almost every aspect of biology and medicine. But Watson's belief that DNA was all-important had a dark side. Watson had always said provocative things, and in his later years, more than once, he asserted that Black people were less intelligent than white people because of their genes. Other biologists condemned these remarks as reckless and scientifically unfounded. Comfort says Watson was shunned, cast out from the scientific world where he once reigned.
COMFORT: He rose and fell on DNA. DNA made him, and DNA unmade him.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: Despite this personal trajectory, the discovery that made Watson famous was undeniably historic. Understanding the structure of DNA turned out to be so powerful, this knowledge changed the world.
Nell Greenfieldboyce, NPR News.
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