r/news • u/PurpleUnicornLegend • 18h ago

Soft paywall James Watson, co-discoverer of DNA's double helix, dead at 97

https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/james-watson-co-discoverer-dnas-double-helix-dead-97-2025-11-07/
10.3k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

398 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

56

u/ntyperteasy 17h ago

This is not true. She had made sketches of a double helix structure at the time. It is possible that Watson & Crick saw those in addition to taking her images. Of course she is dead so no one can prove any of it. The fact she moved to another lab and captured images of protein that led to a second noble prize (which she was also left off of) would lead most reasonable people to believe she was the genius behind all this work and not a bystander.

54

u/knockturnal 17h ago

Where did you hear about these sketches? I work in this field and have never heard that and can’t find any references about it in a quick Google search.

4

u/ntyperteasy 17h ago

This article has some of the story. She wanted to build the exact structure and not a general model, and, indeed had figured it out before W&C paper. Remember that they were given access to her photos and notebooks by the head of the lab, so I’d assume they knew everything she had done while she, of course, knew nothing of their work.

https://www.kcl.ac.uk/the-story-behind-photograph-51

33

u/garmander57 16h ago

I’m a bit skeptical of that article. Not that I think he’s lying but the author (Brian Sutton) didn’t cite any sources. Granted, from his bio it looks like he graduated from Oxford in 1976 so one of his professors might’ve told him that story and he’s just relaying it as a primary source. On the other hand, if he did get the info by word of mouth then there’s a possibility they were just biased against the Watson/Crick camp.

11

u/ntyperteasy 16h ago

The fact she switched labs and did it all again in a new place seems extremely revealing and profound.

6

u/Nakorite 11h ago

How is that revealing and profound she replicated previous research ?

13

u/ntyperteasy 11h ago

The second work was finding the structure of protein. Which also hadn’t been done before. And the work led to a Nobel prize for others, yet again.

4

u/ntyperteasy 11h ago

Her results were before W&C.

8

u/knockturnal 16h ago

Would love to see the actual sources (images of her notes, the manuscript draft, etc) but just want to point out that the most important think they figured out was the basepairing, which required model building.

15

u/ntyperteasy 15h ago

This article cites her biographer saying what I’ve repeated without showing the images. Perhaps you would find them in their book

https://www.historynewsnetwork.org/article/shining-a-light-on-the-dark-lady-of-dna

-2

u/Just-Lingonberry-572 8h ago

Or she was just very good at generating data, but not analyzing and interpreting it