On a foggy Saturday morning in 1953, a tall, skinny 24-year-old man fiddled with shapes he had cut out of cardboard. They represented fragments of a DNA molecule, and young James Watson was trying to ...

In February 1953, two men walked into a pub in Cambridge and announced they had found "the secret of life". It was not an idle boast. One was James Watson, an American biologist from the Cavendish ...

For James Watson, DNA was everything — not just his life's work, but the secret of life itself. Over his long and storied career, Watson arguably did more than any other scientist to transform a ...

James Watson, who has died aged 97, was the 25-year-old American biologist who in 1953, with Francis Crick, revealed the double helix structure of DNA, the chemical of which genes are made; for this ...

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 ...

James D. Watson, the brilliant but controversial American biologist whose 1953 discovery of the structure of DNA, the molecule of heredity, ushered in the age of genetics and provided the foundation ...